Language and the Internet [Hardcover]

The book discusses the effects of the Internet on language, specifically English. Anyone who has spent any length of time online has noted that the language used online is a strange mix of formal and informal, abbreviations and highly-specialised jargon. How does this effect the language as a whole? Crystal does not pretend to answer this question, but raises questions for later research.

As with any book that discusses an aspect of the Internet, some pieces of the book are out-of-date. Search engines are more robust than when Crystal surveyed them. MUDs are essentially dead, replaced in part by massively-multiplayer online games that have their own linguistic ramifications.

In all, this book is an interesting and clearly-written broad introduction to the application of linguistics to the Internet. It is not an advanced text, although the nearly-exhaustive footnotes and citations are an excellent resource for a reader who would like to learn more.

Not because David can't communicate, his writing is easy and sometimes fun. At no point was content hard to get through - what stunk was having to read the book cover to cover before I grasped the book's true value - as a weapon.

As another reviewer pointed out, most of the "conclusions" are what some may call "no brainers." Like, duh! The truest value this book provides is that its hard bound, written by "the guy who wrote the Cambridge dictionary," and therefore immutable.

Think about it. How often do we get into subjective tug-o-wars regarding what users are or are not doing? This book is hard bound, written by a "world famous linguist," and thus proves whatever point I'm trying to make, depending upon which direction the weapon is pointing.

I know it's slimy. I don't care. Its a tool, allowing me to quell schedule-breaking controversy, and as a reference to other research (which is much appreciated!)

So for that reason the book is well worth the investment.

Crystal admits up front that his aims with this book are modest -- basically, he wants to ask whether the Internet has affected language and language use. Um, well, yeah it has.

But he never answers the question that my undergraduate English professor made us ask of all of our paper theses--So what? Why/how do these changes matter? What larger significance do they have? As a linguist, Crystal isn't perhaps so interested in social or political commentary, but never was there such a disembodied look at language. It's as though because the words appear on a screen, we don't need to think about the social, political, or economic pressures that influence these "language communities" he's looking at. He admits that market forces are driving which languages get to be used in the "global village" but then acts as if that fact is of little consequence.

Crystal's method is best described as descriptive--but he doesn't have much to describe, as his sample for analysis includes his own email as well as that of his two children. And as far as I can tell, he doesn't attempt to tie in these changes to any kind of linguistic theory (with the exception of his use of Grice to explain the cooperative nature of conversation). I'm also struck by the lack of evidence that he's read in this area at all--no citation of Sherry Turkle, for example, whose work would have been informative for the whole chapter he spends on MUDs.

If you know next to nothing about Internet-related communication (email, web pages, MUDs) then this book would be a good introduction for you (hence the title of this post). Viewed as an very introductionary text, I'd probably give this a slightly higher rating, because it is clearly written.