BP#4

1. How do you think the rise of social networking affects language use? (Give some examples)

The rise of social networking causes that people can communicate with each other much easier. But because people are usually in a hurry, they use many abbreviations like “o” instead “ok” or “eta” instead “estimated time of arrival.” Very often people don’t say “I’m happy” or “I’m sad,” replacing those words with emoticons.  We could see that as a negative trend, causing people to reduce English to few letters or symbols; as something that is killing the language. But social networking has not only bad influence on language, it causes that English develops further, that new words are created what is a sign that the language is very much alive. Now we can “friend” somebody on Facebook, but we can also “unfriend” this person.  “Digging” (giving something or someone thumbs-up) is as much popular as “undigging” which is the antonym of the first word. And there is the whole vocabulary connected with Twitter, where for example “twitting” has nothing to do with birds. Only dead languages like for example Latin don’t change anymore. Today’s English is so different from Shakespeare’s English; this change has been happening forever. Social networking is only one of the factors influencing and speeding up those changes.

2. Does the spread of the Internet and other technologies create a larger need for English knowledge around the world, or reduce its necessity?

English has been one of the most popular languages in the word for some time already, but the development of technology and Internet caused that it has become the most popular language learned as a second language in the world. The most information on the Internet on basically any topic you can find in English. Most scientific publications are made in this language, what makes easier for the scientist from all over the world to familiarize with them. Even many technicians have been “forced” to learn English because most technical specifications are in this language, especially in the computer science domain. Internet has removed communicational barriers among people, and English made this communication possible.