Role of Language in the Internet and the effect of the Internet on Language

The Internet is one of the most remarkable things human beings have ever made. With the past few decades, internet has become so popular and it is an integral part of our daily lives. Email, instant messaging and chat are rapidly replacing the conventional forms of correspondence, and the Web has become the first port of call for both information enquiry and leisure activity. How is this affecting language? There is a widespread view that as ‘technospeak’ comes to rule, standards will be lost. This project is an attempt to explore this linguistic problem. A qualitative and also quantitative study is conducted here to see how internet’s global scale and intensity is having an effect on language in general, and on individual languages in particular. Covering a range of Internet genres, including e-mail, chat and the Web, this is a revealing account of how the Internet is radically changing the way we use language. The thesis work will first discuss the role of language in the internet and thereafter, the effect of the internet on language with central focus on the latter. David Crystal, in his book Language and the Internet says that language is at the heart of internet. Internet comes increasingly to be viewed from a social perspective, so the role of language becomes central. Thus internet is a medium of communication which is inevitable aided by language. Whether it is browsing, blogging, chatting or e-mails, language has a great role to play because if we do not know the language, then we cannot use the internet at all.
The influence of internet over the language has to be viewed in much broader aspect. There is of course nothing new about the fears accompanying the emergence of a new communications technology. In the fifteenth century, the arrival of printing was widely perceived by the Church as an invention of Satan, the hierarchy fearing that the dissemination of uncensored ideas would lead to a breakdown of social order and put innumerable souls at