Introduction

I am a 19 years old undergraduate that came from Taiwan. My mother tongue is Chinese, especially Traditional Chinese in contrast to Simplified Chinese that people from China use. I self recognize that I am bilingual. Though my Chinese is more fluent than English. Due to living and studying in Taiwan and everyone here speaks Chinese.

I will use the perspective of an English user to talk about the impact on English caused by the internet. Hope you can share your observation as an English native speaker or an English user, like me.

The observation and impact

I just found out the Generation Z had created hundreds of new phrases and words in English. This impact dramatically affects the language itself and also its users. A few minutes before writing this post, I used the word “mispost” in Github issue tracker to explain that we needed to develop the delete function from my working project. The spell checker immediately drew the conspicuous (meaning very unpleasant and noticeable.) red underline on my “mispost”. The word mispost had been recorded in Urban Dictionary. Thus, I’m not the only one using this word. But that old stubborn system still drew a stupid wavy red line under my “mispost” while I was writing this post.

I think this might be caused by the dramatic growing English phrases and words. In the past, most commonly used words are developed in a quite slow speed in contrast to nowadays. (Except when William Shakespeare was writing his plays. He had developed too many words.) The spell checker developers are used to design the system that memorizes every phrase and word and checks them in rather simple logic, but this is not suitable now. Too many new commonly used words had flooded into the language. The spell checker software is unable to update fast enough to handle this kind of situation, not to mention those poor English users who are going to adapt all of these by linguistic instincts. ( “linguistic instinct” here refers to that some people believe human brains are “preinstalled” with the ability to learn language structure.)

The network had accelerated the connection of peoples. Culture, societies, and other things that worked, grew, evolved slowly in the past are drastically changing nowadays. This is an astonishing and magnificent phenomenon, and it is displayed in front of us. What’s more, we are a part of it. We shall wait and see how things will go and….. (I felt sleepy and there’s nothing worth to say. It’s time for you to think, and talk about the impact and how you feel in this flood of internet connection.)

Post script

To talk about a topic related to English. I think using Chinese to discuss it would be weird. Writing in English is hard. (Compare to Chinese, there are too many words that have similar meaning but had slight difference between them.)

During the writing process, to enhance the precision of word usage. I almost check out every word I used in dictionaries, reads their definition and synonyms to find the most suitable word to fully express what I mean and eliminate as much possibility of misleading my readers as I could.

Sentences are constantly checked after they were written. To ensure they are in a good shape.

It is such a tiring work to talk about cultural evolution, but I think it is crucial for us to aware and observe the tendency of our “communication infrastructure”, language. These topics and problems are gaining attraction in Traditional Chinese user community. Due to the cultural dissonance between Traditional Chinese culture and Simplified Chinese culture which the latter is a stronger culture, and the former is more historical. But for English users, maybe these kinds of topic and problem is less discussed in contrast to Traditional Chinese community.

Finally, this post is also posted on my personal Facebook. My friends and others may discuss there more than the comment below. Check it out and leave what you think in the comment below or comment in the Facebook post.

Thanks

I need to give a big thanks to kiki, my friend, and Grammarly who correct my post, let me make fewer English grammar mistakes.