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viernes, 1 de junio de 2012

PERSPECTIVES


SOCIOLINGUISTIC PERSPECTIVE
This perspective deals with how society views the impact of Internet development on languages. The advent of the Internet has revolutionized communication in many ways; it changed the way people communicate and created new platforms with far-reaching social impact. Significant avenues include but are not limited to SMS Text Messaging, e-mails, chatgroups, virtual worlds and the Web.
The evolution of these new mediums of communications has raised much concern with regards to the way language is being used. According to Crystal (2005), these concerns are neither without grounds nor unseen in history – it surfaces almost always when a new technology breakthrough influences languages; as seen in the 15th century when printing was introduced, the 19th century when the telephone was invented and the 20th century when broadcasting began to penetrate our society. 

EDUCATIONAL PERSPECTIVE
The educational perspective of internet linguistics examines the Internet's impact on formal language use, specifically on Standard English, which in turn affects language education. The rise and rapid spread of Internet use has brought about new linguistic features specific only to the Internet platform. These include, but are not limited to, an increase in the use of informal written language, inconsistency in written styles and stylistics and the use of new abbreviations in Internet chats and SMS text messaging, where constraints of technology on word count contributed to the rise of new abbreviations. Such acronyms exist primarily for practical reasons — to reduce the time and effort required to communicate through these mediums apart from technological limitations. Examples of common acronyms include lol (for laughing out loud; a general expression of laughter), omg (oh my god) and gtg (got to go).
The educational perspective has been considerably established in the research on the Internet's impact on language education. It is an important and crucial aspect as it affects and involves the education of current and future student generations in the appropriate and timely use of informal language that arises from Internet usage. There are concerns for the growing infiltration of informal language use and incorrect word use into academic or formal situations, such as the usage of casual words like "guy" or the choice of the word "preclude" in place of "precede" in academic papers by students. There are also issues with spellings and grammar occurring at a higher frequency among students' academic works as noted by educators, with the use of abbreviations such as "u" for "you" and "2" for "to" being the most common.

Blogs
Blogging has brought about new ways of writing diaries and from a linguistic perspective, the language used in blogs is "in its most 'naked' form", published for the world to see without undergoing the formal editing process. This is what makes blogs stand out because almost all other forms of printed language have gone through some form of editing and standardization. David Crystal stated that blogs were "the beginning of a new stage in the evolution of the written language". Blogs have become so popular that they have expanded beyond written blogs, with the emergence of photoblog, videoblog, audioblog and moblog. These developments in interactive blogging have created new linguistic conventions and styles, with more expected to arise in the future.

Virtual worlds
Virtual worlds provide insights into how users are adapting the usage of natural language for communication within these new mediums. The Internet language that has arisen through user interactions in text-based chatrooms and computer-simulated worlds has led to the development of slangs within digital communities. Examples of these include pwn and noob. Emoticons are further examples of how users have adapted different expressions to suit the limitations of cyberspace communication, one of which is the "loss of emotivity".

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