Im in ur internets, creolizin ur english

By R.L.G. | NEW YORK

THERE are a lot of good questions to consider about the internet and language. There are equally many good questions to be asked about the future of English now that a majority of its speakers are non-natives. But last week's BBC Magazine piece on the future of English online is a dog's breakfast of confused concepts, true but misleading facts, and otherwise misguided attempts to make sense of many related, but distinct, trends in English.

Fortunately, Jane O'Brien avoided the tsk-tsking, declinist tone of so many articles like this. She talked to some relevant experts. But to take just one core example, she seems to have misunderstood what they told her:

In previous centuries, the convergence of cultures and trade led to the emergence of pidgin - a streamlined system of communication that has simple grammatical structure, says Michael Ullman, director of research at Georgetown University's Brain and Language Lab.

When the next generation of pidgin speakers begins to add vocabulary and grammar, it becomes a distinct Creole language. "You get different endings, it's more complex and systematised. Something like that could be happening to English on the web," he says.

Take Hinglish...

No, don't take Hinglish. It's not a creole. It's a broad term referring to either English with a healthy dash of unique Indian vocabulary, or the Indian languages spoken with English words and phrases thrown in, or the speech of Indians comfortable switching back and forth quickly between two languages. But it's nowhere near a full creole, and so is not a good pointer to what is happening to English online.

Ms O'Brien is right that linguists call an improvised contact language a pidgin. It will typically mix the two groups' native languages. The almost magical transformation to a creole is when children born in the contact situation learn the pidgin as their native language. Only then do we see "different endings...more complex and systematised". Creoles are internally consistent, with a fully functional new grammar. (Typically they use fewer word-endings than the parent languages do.) Such creoles can even be national languages, as in Haiti and New Guinea. The fact that such perfect languages arise from such imperfect circumstances has long been fascinating to psychologists of language. The story of Nicaraguan Sign Language, developed by neglected deaf children, is a particularly exciting example of a full-fledged language arising from no ingredients at all.

But this isn't what's happening to English online. Many non-natives write online in English. Some of them have distinctive varieties of English, but none are creolising the main body of English. Hinglish is not being learned or written by non-Indians. Singlish (from Singapore) is more like a real creole, an established dialect of English that is difficult for non-Singaporeans to follow. But again, it's not being learned by non-Singaporeans and thus changing standard English. Singaporeans use (usually quite good) standard English with non-Singaporeans. Many other non-natives are simply writing English full of the typical mistakes of a non-fluent speaker. But there are no children learning their first language from this broken English and regularising the mistakes into a new creole. The reason is obvious: children do not learn their first language from the internet.

Roughly, three things are happening. One is that we already know British and American English are seeding each other with new words and phrases (to the annoyance of some on bothsides). It's likely that this is increasing in the age of globalisation and the internet. As India rises and its many speakers of English spread their culture around the world, we're likely to see more Hinglish in standard English, too. Other English-speaking groups will contribute as well. But this will probably be limited to a few words and phrases. This is just plain old borrowing, not creolisation.

The second new thing is that improvised, speech-like forms of written English are proliferating on Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere. This means that non-standard dialects (Hinglish, Singlish, southern white English, black American English) are being written more than they used to. We might even see "standard" written forms of these, or something like them, emerge. But they will remain minority dialects, with Indians, Singaporeans, Cockneys or Brooklynites knowing they need to use standard English when writing formally for a wider audience.

The biggest potential change is the third. What could it mean that so many non-natives are learning and using English imperfectly? This has less to do with the internet. Non-natives are already interacting with each other in person, in English, all around the world. It's harder to forecast the structural changes that this could cause to standard English. But a few guesses are possible.

A few bits of English grammar are both tricky and non-essential. The contact between Anglo-Saxons, Vikings and Normans probably caused the death of Old English's elaborate case system, as many adults and then their children learned the old language imperfectly. It's easy to imagine modern-day contact finishing off some of the last vestiges of that case system, like "whom". (This is an easy call, since natives already fail to master "whom"; its decline is in progress.) Probably many other such changes will take place. But it's hard to say what they'll be. The tense-aspect system is one candidate. When to use "I speak", "I do speak" and "I'm speaking", "I have spoken", "I spoke" and such is hard to master. As the numerical advantage of non-natives over natives grows, changes to that system are possible. Maybe non-native speakers can tell us in the comments: what bits of tricky English do you ignore when you can get away with it (speaking to other non-natives, for example)?

English is undergoing a novel experiment. I can't think of a standardised living language that has been spoken by more non-native-speakers than natives for a long time. Natives consider the language "theirs", and will resist deep structural changes. The influence of foreigners is likely to cause annoyance. But such changes will come, inevitably, if slowly. Check back on this blog in five hundred years.