How The Internet Has Changed The Way We Speak

Our language has evolved beyond recognition.

The internet has changed so much with regard to our daily lives it’s hard to keep track. It’s affected everything from life’s truly mundane activities like shopping for groceries, paying bills and filing taxes to the broader, philosophical areas of work, dating, privacy and culture themselves. However, somewhat ironically, one of the macro ways in which the internet has changed our culture isn’t talked about so much. That is, of course, language.
The vast amount of communication that now occurs by way of pixels and fiber optic cables rather than vocal cords and telephones is staggering. Unsurprisingly, we’ve invented new, more efficient and more appropriate ways of expressing ourselves online. Just look at the way that your grandparents speak in comparison to today’s teens, and you’ll get an idea of just how much language has changed in a short amount of time.
The interesting thing is that the rate at which the internet has changed the way we communicate with one another is evolving much faster than dictionaries and linguists can study or keep up with. Just ask Erin McKean, a former editor of the New Oxford American Dictionary, who recently launched a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign to “find a million words that haven’t been included in major English dictionaries and give them each a home on the Internet.”. Created from the premise that every word should be “lookupable,” McKean plans to use casual definitions that can already be found around the internet—in news articles, Urban Dictionary entries or Wikipedia pages, for example—to avoid the laborious and time-consuming process of writing fundamental definitions themselves. It’s a valiant effort, and the sheer magnitude of what she is trying to achieve is a testament to how quickly internet culture can change and evolve.
There are lots of ways the internet has changed the way we speak. Here are some primary themes and categories that stand out:
Emojis: What was once expressed in words is now done so in small and cute little icons. Where once a colon next to a parenthesis was just a way of expressing a little happiness, now complex stories can be told with the dozens of emojis, which are available on the average smartphone. People are so passionate about their right to express themselves via emoji that there are entire internet campaigns devoted to having certain emoji variations added, and the way we communicate can be fundamentally change when they succeed. One prominent example is when iOS finally included multi-racial emojis earlier this year.
Cultural phenomenon: These are social phenomena that nearly every single person with an internet connection knows about, but usually didn’t exist as a word or concept just a few years before. Take, for example, the selfie. Selfie is a word that has literally hundreds of billions of search results on Google. However, in true internet style, there is no telling that it will actually last long enough as a cultural phenomenon to become recognized as an actual word of the English language.
Abbreviations: Originally developed as a shorthand technique when texting or typing, internet abbreviations now seem to mean more than the sum of their parts. Some, like “LOL” “OMG” and “BRB”, are used so frequently that we have begun to say them out loud as part of our verbal speech as well as just in a hastily-written text message. Others are specifically designed for the world of “sharing,” such as TBT (throwback Thursday), frequently used on Instagram, or ICYMI (in case you missed it), often included in an email when you’re sending a news article to a friend.
Memes: Memes themselves pre-date the internet, but the speed with which they have proliferated on the internet has made them ever more powerful. From the nonsensical Lolcats “I can haz cheeseburger” meme to the double entendre of the innocent-sounding “Netflix and Chill,” it can often feel like a full-time job just keeping up with what the internet is actually talking about.
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