The new millennium started off in the wake of globalization. Its communicative push had never been seen before and was tightly connected to the development of technology and its speed of expansion. The present day history of Internet sees the co-existence of two linguistic situations on the Web: on the one hand, the various languages in the world, whose presence is limited to less formal dominions, such as chat rooms and social networking, and on the other, English that remains the indisputable idiom in formal communication. Web language is very difficult to define because Internet users and the situations on the net are by no means homogenous; this makes the characteristics of English vary rapidly. This type of English, in continual evolution, hard to crystallize and “prototypical”, is used for socialising on the net, to eliminate every kind of linguistic, geographical and social-cultural distances that is already performed by Internet, and to set out the bases of a universal lingua franca.
English in the Net
D'ANGELO, Adriana
2008-01-01
Abstract
The new millennium started off in the wake of globalization. Its communicative push had never been seen before and was tightly connected to the development of technology and its speed of expansion. The present day history of Internet sees the co-existence of two linguistic situations on the Web: on the one hand, the various languages in the world, whose presence is limited to less formal dominions, such as chat rooms and social networking, and on the other, English that remains the indisputable idiom in formal communication. Web language is very difficult to define because Internet users and the situations on the net are by no means homogenous; this makes the characteristics of English vary rapidly. This type of English, in continual evolution, hard to crystallize and “prototypical”, is used for socialising on the net, to eliminate every kind of linguistic, geographical and social-cultural distances that is already performed by Internet, and to set out the bases of a universal lingua franca.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
