[phillipamann]

This is something I talk about with my friend who is doing a PhD in linguistics. I noticed as well that the internet is changing the English language. The rampant globalization that came with the internet combined with English being the defacto language of the internet has allowed it to change. It would be interested to mine Twitter and a few other sources and try to observe how English is changing.

I suspect if you mined Twitter, you would see a 'dumbing down' of English due to the constraints of Twitter. How one would quantify 'dumbing down' is a challenge (if it hasn't been solved already). However, I am more interested in how this 'Twitter effect' cascades to other areas of English.

There are other implications of the internet too I'd love to study but these questions are relevant to this article.

[jacquesm]

> English being the defacto language of the internet

That's quite a statement. There is a huge volume of Spanish content that you'd never realize was there until you typed in a Spanish query into a search engine. The various language webs are for the most part islands. English is a little bit over-represented on the web but this is mostly because of the fact that in the early days the English web moved quite rapid and other countries slowly caught up as they came online.

Over the long haul this will normalize to representation roughly proportional on the world population. For our profession English will always give you a head-start.