Internet, there is no difference between sending an e-mail
2
,
participating in a video conference, chatting
3
with the next-
door friend or with our ‘cyber’ friend from New Zealand. On
the Internet, the distance concept loses most of its
significance. We all are increasingly becoming citizens of the
‘global village’ described by McLuhan
4
a few decades ago
(prehistory, considering Internet’s high speed evolution),
which is becoming reality. We are almost forced to correct
some habits of our lives, to think and see things from a global
and planetary new perspective.
In this new global context, it is essential for everybody
to be able to make himself understood to a potentially
worldwide audience; in other words, it is necessary to be able
to use a universal language, or, at least, a language which can
be understood by as many people as possible.
networks; a cyberlibrarian is someone who uses the Internet for research; a cyberpunk is an anarchic
presence living from their wits; etc.
2
Electronic mail (see Section 2.3). Messages, usually text, sent from one person to another via
computer. E- mail can also be sent automatically to a large number of addresses - Mailing List (see
Section 2.7) (Matisse’s Glossary of Internet Terms).
3
To communicate in real-time through the Internet (see Section 2.4). When we chat with someone, the
typed words appear on a "shared" screen (The Language of the Internet).
4
McLuhan (1964).
Today, English seems to be the only language which can
be considered both a global language, and the real lingua
franca of the Internet. When we say ‘English’ we do not refer
only to the Standard language spoken in England and other
native English-speaking countries, but rather to “a number of
distinct and highly diversified varieties of English”
(Burchfield, 1994b, p. 1), including a range of
institutionalized and increasingly autonomous non-native
varieties, frequently referred to as ‘New Englishes’. Roughly
speaking, we can say we refer to the so-called Global English,
whose main standard varieties are British English and
American English.
The Internet has always spoken English, since it was
created. It is speaking it today, while it is still ‘a child’.
Certainly it will speak English when ‘adult’ too, even if it is
extremely difficult to predict in what way, measure and,
principally, what kind of English it will be.
Recently the Internet has expanded all over the world
and has connected countries with different languages. English
plays a very important role in this multinational system: it
enables the large number of people speaking many different
national languages to communicate and make themselves
understood.
This would never be possible to such an extent if the
lingua franca of the Internet was any other language. As we
shall see in fact, English was already the most widely used
language throughout the world in the pre-Internet age. And for
its existing status as a global language, it has clearly become
the lingua franca of the Internet. It is true that, as we shall
see, there are numerous other reasons for the dominance of
English on the Internet, such as the historical fact that the
Internet was born in the United Sates, an English-speaking
country, and the transmission protocol technology adopted.
But the need for a common language on the Internet has
certainly played a major role. Because of the large number of
countries into which the Internet has spread and which bring
with them a considerable variety of languages, English, for its
status as a world language, has appeared the ideal tongue for
international communication on the Internet, and has become
its lingua franca.
As Crystal (1997) says:
There has never been a time when so many nations were
needing to talk to each other so much. ... There has never
been such a strain placed on the conventional resources of
translating and interpreting. ... Never has there been a
more urgent need for a global language. (Crystal, 1997, p.
12).
The present study attempts to show the most important
aspects and implications of the status of English as the lingua
franca of the Internet. After a brief presentation of the new
communications technology, its history, and its main
communication services, it examines the actual relationship
between the Internet and the English language, and explores
possible factors which might threaten the hegemony of
English on the Internet in the future, in view of current trends
that may be observed on the World Wide Web (WWW)
5
.
The study is also concerned with an examination of some
of the characteristic features of the new forms of text and the
5
Frequently used (incorrectly) when referring to “The Internet”, WWW is a part of the Internet. It is a
network of HTML documents (see Section 1.4) which are linked together and located all over the
world (Babylon translator).
new communicative practices generated by the new
communications technologies, as well as with an illustration
of a number of codes and conventions developed by Internet
users, which also contribute to the novelty of electronic
language and genres.
(Table of contents)
C H A P T E R I
A Brief History of the Internet
1.1 - Main phases in the Internet’s evolution
The sequence of events, projects, ideas and protagonists
that, in the course of the last thirty years, have given birth to
the Internet and have developed it into its present form
constitutes a very fascinating chapter in the history of
technological development.
Beginning with the early research on packet switching
1
,
the United States government, industry and academia have
been partners in evolving this new technology.
Broadly speaking, it is possible to identify three
different phases in the historical development of the
phenomenon:
- Military Phase (1969 - 1983)
- Research Phase (1983 - 1991)
- Commercial Phase (1991 - …)
Moreover, we can consider as a ‘Prehistoric Phase’ the
period 1957-1969.
1
The method used to move data around on the Internet. In packet switching, all the data coming out of
a machine is broken up into chunks, each chunk has the address of where it came from and where it is
going. This enables chunks of data from many different sources to co-mingle on the same lines, and be
sorted and directed to different routes by special machines along the way. In this way many people can
use the same lines at the same time (Matisse’s Glossary of Internet Terms).
In fact, in 1957, during the Cold War years, after the
Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik, the first artificial satellite,
Dwight Eisenhower, the President of the United States, saw
the need to establish the Advanced Research Projects Agency
(ARPA), a special agency within the U.S. Department of
Defense. ARPA was responsible for establishing an American
lead in science and technology applicable to the military. The
organization united some of America’s most brilliant people,
who developed the first successful American satellite in 18
months.
Several years later, ARPA began to focus on computer
networking and communication technology. In 1962, Dr.
J.C.R. Licklider of MIT (Massachusetts Institute of
Technology) was chosen to head ARPA’s research to improve
the military use of computer technology. The first recorded
description of the social interactions that could be enabled
through networking was a series of memos
2
written by
Licklider in August 1962 discussing his "Galactic Network"
concept. Licklider envisioned a globally interconnected set of
2
Licklider and Clark (1962).
computers through which everyone could quickly access data
and programs from any site. In spirit, the concept was very
similar to the Internet of today. Licklider sought to make
government computers more interactive and, to quickly
expand technology, he saw the need to move ARPA’s
contracts to universities, thus laying the foundations of what
would become the ARPANET, ARPA’s network, the ancestor
of the Internet.
1.2 - Military phase
It can be said that the real history of the Internet starts
in 1969 when ARPA’s communications network was finally
established, connecting the military establishment with four
universities: the University of California at Los Angeles
(UCLA) and Santa Barbara (UCSB), Stanford University
(SRI), and the University of Utah (UTAH) in Salt Lake City.
Figure 1 shows the original four ‘nodes’:
Figure 1 - Initial Network configuration
Source: NCTimec.Net (www.nctimes.net/~sirsteward/nsfnet.htm)
The network was called ARPANET (Advanced Research
Projects Agency Network), the precursor, as we have noted, to
the present-day Internet. Its purpose was to create a
communication network which could connect the various
computers present in the most important American academic
and governmental institutions “for the sake of national
research-and-development projects” (Sterling, 1993).
Since those were the years of the Cold War between the
two superpowers - the USA and the Soviet Union - , and the
possibility of a nuclear war was not remote at all, it was
attempted to create a communication network that could
survive a nuclear attack, allowing the different computers to
communicate with each other even in the event that part of
them should be destroyed or made unusable because of enemy
attacks.
Hence, decentralization and independence of each
computer in the network were of fundamental importance:
none of the connected computers would have had to play a
central role in the transmission of data; each computer would
have been able to correctly direct both incoming and outgoing
information. Even if one or more segments of the network
were destroyed, the data would have been shifted
automatically into other computers and from there to the final
recipient, without being lost.
The military ARPANET achieved its primary aim
through the creation and application of a new standard
transmission protocol. Indeed, the ARPA's original standard
for communication was known as NCP, ‘Network Control
Protocol’, but as time passed and the technique advanced,
NCP was superseded by a higher-level, more sophisticated
standard known as TCP/IP. TCP, or ‘Transmission Control
Protocol’, converts messages into streams of packets at the
source, then reassembles them back into messages at the
destination. IP, or ‘Internet Protocol’, handles the
addressing, seeing to it that packets are routed across multiple
nodes and even across multiple networks with multiple
standards - not only ARPA's pioneering NCP standard -, but
others like Ethernet, FDDI, and X.25 (Sterling, 1993).
Therefore, the adoption of a single data transmission protocol
enabled all the computers in the network to communicate with
each other without any problems, since they in fact spoke the
same ‘language’.
The creators of TCP/IP, Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn, first
coined the term ‘Internet’ in a paper they wrote on the new
protocol
3
. In 1976, after experimenting with TCP/IP, the
Department of Defense decided that it would be the only
protocol used on ARPANET. As early as 1977, TCP/IP was
being used by other networks to link to ARPANET.
ARPANET itself remained fairly tightly controlled, at least
until 1983, when its military segment broke off and became
MILNET. But TCP/IP linked them all. And ARPANET itself,
though it was growing, became a smaller and smaller
neighbourhood amid the vastly growing galaxy of other linked
machines. As the '70s and '80s advanced, many very different
social groups found themselves in possession of powerful
computers. It was fairly easy to link these computers to the
growing network-of-networks. As the use of TCP/IP became
more common, entire other networks fell into the digital
embrace of the Internet, and messily adhered. Since the
software called TCP/IP was public-domain, and the basic
technology was decentralized and rather anarchic by its very
nature, it was difficult to stop people from barging in and
linking up somewhere-or-other.
3
Cerf and Kahn (1974).
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