Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

Languages change, especially in cyberspace, and this is the topic of Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language, a 2019 general-audience book by linguist Gretchen McCulloch. The work examines how conversations, especially informal online texts and chats, create new writing and speaking styles. Widely praised, Because Internet became a New York Times bestseller.

Author McCulloch writes a regular column for Wired magazine; she also blogs at All Things Linguistic and hosts a podcast, Lingthusiasm.

Readers are cautioned that some passages use swear words. The book contains 37 pages of Notes and an 11-page Index. The original 2019 edition’s ebook version forms the basis for this study guide.

Summary

With smartphones and the internet, people write much more than in the past, and their wording is also more informal. Linguists who study these changes at first relied on interviews and questionnaires, but today they can simply download publicly available chatter from places like Twitter and Facebook.

Despite radio and TV, local regions retain their accents and expressions. Still, languages shift over time partly because teenagers use different words and pronunciations to distinguish their groups from each other. This is also true of ethnic communities, specialists, hobbyists, and internet groups, where newer members use newer group slang than older members.

A language changes faster when users have lots of casual connections to outsiders. The internet has differing effects on different languages: When personal computing was new, most devices’ keyboards used Western lettering, so Arabic speakers adapted those letters to sound out their words.

Over the decades, five types of people have gone online. Old Internet People were on the internet during the Usenet and Listserv era of the 1970s and 1980s, when computers were primitive and technical knowledge was required to run them. The World Wide Web, launched in 1989, made the internet easy for everyone; Full Internet People joined and used the Web for social and practical reasons, while Semi Internet People surfed the Web for work-related or other practical purposes. In the 2000s and 2010s, Post Internet People joined up while still children to hang out with their friends; Pre Internet elders finally joined to contact their offspring and old friends and fill out forms at government bureaus. 

Online writers often use punctuation and capitalization to express attitudes and emotions. Extra letters, as in yayyy or nooo, indicate strong feelings, as do tildes and asterisks around words. All caps signify importance or shouting; no caps, or capitalizing common nouns, denote irony or sarcasm.

Informal talking involves gestures, but it’s hard to convey hand waves and facial expressions in writing. For this, little pictures called emoji that fit on a line of text have brought smiley faces, thumbs-up gestures, and more to online chatter. In much the same way that hands and faces clarify the meaning of our words—softening a criticism with a smile or making clear our approval with a thumbs-up—emoji bring better understanding to internet conversations.

Online language condenses to become more efficient. Emails largely dropped the use of “Dear” and “Sincerely,” and text and chat use abbreviations, short phrases, and quick back-and-forth to imitate casual conversation. This has helped the internet become, after home and work, a third place where people can meet up socially.

Memes, concepts that move through a population, grow quickly on the internet. Most online memes are about online culture—cat videos, the word “teh” for “the”—but some break into offline culture: Pepe the Frog became a printed symbol for white supremacy, and college applicants began selecting universities based on their online memes. The memes that catch on aren’t polished, professional creations but messy, informal, and accessible.

We think of books as the containers of language, but they’re more like a record and a guide. The only fixed languages are dead ones. Languages exist in the minds of the people who use them; they change constantly, and the internet makes that process more robust, dynamic, and available to all.