Twentyyears ago this week the British inventor Tim Berners-Lee created theworld’s first webpage. It is worth pausing to consider the extraordinaryimpact that his invention has had on the English language.
Everyday words like google, unfriend and app simply didn't exist in 1990.
Evenmore words have had unexpected shifts in meaning in those two decades.If you had mentioned tweeting to an English-speaker a few years ago, hewould have assumed you were talking about bird noises, not the use ofthe microblogging site Twitter.
Long ago, if someone lived online, it didn't mean they spent every waking minute on the internet, but that they travelled around with the rail network.
And wireless still means, to anyone of a certain age , a radio - not the system for retrieving internet pages without wires.
"The internet is an amazing medium for languages," said David Crystal, honorary professor of linguistics at the University of Bangor. "Language itself changes slowly but the internet has speeded up the process of those changes so you notice them more quickly."
English is a remarkably inclusive language, and if words continue to be used for at least five years they generally end up in the Oxford English Dictionary.
Grammatically correct? An LOLcat.
But less accepted are the peculiar dialects that have sprung up amongst some users. For example, 'LOLcat' is a phonetic , grammatically-incorrect caption that accompanies a picture of a cat, like "I'm in ur bed zleeping".
In an article called "Cats Can Has Grammar" the blogger Anil Dash referred to LOLcat as " kitty pidgin ". But does something like LOLcat have the staying power to become an accepted form of English?
Notaccording to Professor Crystal. "They are all clever littledevelopments used by a very small number of people - thousands ratherthan millions. Will they be around in 50 years' time? I would be verysurprised."
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