At this time when the whole world is celebrating the 400th anniversary of the demise of the great Elizabethan dramatist, William Shakespeare, I am sure the graceful Swan of Avon is ruffling his feathers at the rapid transformation of the language he so beautifully enriched.

As Britannia increasingly rules the e-waves it is being swamped by savage billows of a form of cyberspeak as baffling to the ‘unwired’ as teenspeak is to parents.

Unfortunately, information technology in the form of internet, Facebook or SMS has downgraded octogenarians, myself included, to the depths of a cyber ghetto completely lost in the new jargon of the internet. In the twilight of my life, I find myself bewildered by the complex language emanating from this newspeak, the language of the Oracle.

The proliferation of the internet and other IT communications have sounded the death knell to the art of letter writing.

In this global situation, a good mastery of the English language in all its forms assumes much greater importance. I believe every new net-user will have to learn a version of specific English if s/he is to be familiar with the changing world and highly alert to the shifting sands of computer technology. Of course, the new jargon surely does not resemble the Queen’s English. It is a form of cyberspeak where brevity is the only style and, in the process, phonetic spelling is the order of the day. The internet has also developed a new language completely alien to the very old generation. I recently discovered that the word ‘emoticon’, also known as smiley, is an online symbol composed of a few punctuation marks and used as emotional shorthand to add meaning to a message.

Statistics for March 2015 showing content language on websites place the English language in a class of its own, overwhelmingly ahead of all languages. This high global position of the English language is mainly attributed to the economic and political influence of English-speaking countries, notably Great Britain and the United States. Experts believe there is a very remote possibility that only an artificial language, like Esperanto or China, can topple the English language from its Olympian heights.

The net pushes the global power of the English language more ruthlessly and forcefully than the mighty British Empire ever could

Today, Britannia, represented in the internet by its language, is truly ruling the e-waves. In the process, one notices the proliferation of neo-logisms: e-mail, Facebook, selfie, emoticon, cyberspace etc.

More impressive is the hard fact that the internet is overwhelmingly an English language medium, an estimated 85 per cent of its pages being in English.

This language of our former colonial masters, or probably that of the American masters, experts believe, will be competently spoken by half of the world’s population by 2050.

In retrospect, it should be recalled that after the bitter War of Independence, when the United States defeated Britain, their former colonial masters in 1814, Norman Webster took 26 years to compile his dictionary, now in its 12th edition. It was intended to unify the nation which Winston Churchill once observed to be divisive as in his statement: “we are divided by the same language”.

The internet is creating a similar evolution but at a much faster rate. Some linguists believe that, within 10 years, English will further dominate the “e-waves” but in forms very different to what we accept and recognise today.

The expansion of the English language is definitely not a new phenomenon. When the Oxford English Dictionary was first compiled in 1928 it defined 200,000 words. In view of the regular additions of new words, supplements and amalgamations, the second edition, published in 1989, defines 240,000 words. It is a cumulative project: words are added not deleted.

This accelerated growth produced a strange phenomenon when, in March 2000, the Oxford English Dictionary went online with a staggering 60 million words on it. This online dictionary does not claim to defend “correct English” but it asserts the historical depth of the language with the Bard of Avon as its bedrock. In fact, its fascinating etymologies are a testimony describing the way that words carry the past into the present.

The BBC ascribes this rapid transformation of the English language to the people who, like the Maltese, speak English as a second language and who presently outnumber the native speakers. Increasingly, they use their peculiar language for communication with other non-native speakers, especially on the internet, Facebook and mobile phones, where less attention is paid to grammar, spelling and punctuation. Such users do not have to worry about their accents.

Users of Facebook, according to the BBC, already socialise in a number of different “Englishes” including Indian English, known as Hinglish, Spanish English, or Spanglish, and Korean English – Konglish.

The net pushes the global power of the English language more ruthlessly and forcefully than the mighty British Empire ever could. The obvious effect of this will be to re-enforce the teaching of English in all its forms while appreciating its importance as a world language in all spheres.

Lino Bugeja is a Commonwealth scholar.

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