Blog Post #4

How do you think the rise of social networking affects language use? (Give some examples)

From experience, the way social networking affects language use is that someone may not even know how to properly pronounce a word but will be able to spell it correctly or mostly incorrectly. On social networking sites, there’s a trend of shortening of words used to communicate such as “r” instead of “are” or abbreviation of words such as “tmrw” instead of “tomorrow.” The prescriptive rules of English grammar do not tend to apply when it comes to typing. Grammatical errors, misspellings and punctuation are all ignored on social networking sites. For the younger crowd especially those in secondary education, it tends to be an escape from the professional and academia world. The most shocking of all is that the professional/academia world has adapted to this trend of language use and formerly improper words are now proper and can be found in the latest dictionaries.

Does the spread of the Internet and other technologies create a larger need for English knowledge around the world, or reduce its necessity?

The increase in the need of the English has spread throughout the years dramatically, what first started out to be westernized is now globalized and most importantly universal. From a distinct geographical area of the Americas and Western Europe, its factually stated that English has become the common language of a few nations but the universal secondary language of many nations. Both of the videos give statistics that use and innovation of technology has revolutionized the world as it is. What took days, months to mail, now can be reached in matter of seconds with the creation of email. The use of social networking was used during the revolutions in North Africa and the Middle East. The English language can be spoken in nations that once used one tribal language, you may go to nearly any nation in the world and speak or even read English, it has become the universal language of the globe and continues its path through technology. All corporate websites visited from around the world, English will be the default language. The smaller or non-profit website will have an English option for you to view. The language has become the capital language of business, society and life.