Shakespeare on Twitter: the evolution of internet-speak

It can be said that at the heart of the controversy about “proper” language lies a simple white notebook with the words “Shakespeare never tweeted a sonnet” printed in black Helvetica.

To understand why this notebook is so important, we need to understand the culture in which it was made. Internet communication—like Twitter—is an ever-increasing part of our daily lives, but the way it shapes our speech and written language is still largely unstudied. My favourite piece of linguistic commentary is the “What are Your Teens Saying” type articles for worried parents who want to know the meaning of “smh” or “get rekt.” To young people, these pieces are funny because adults have no understanding of their “everyday language.” However, adults, through their ignorance, are actually illustrating what’s really going on here: the creation of an entirely new dialect.

And let’s be clear—there are actually thousands of new dialects being created online, because dialects differ from platform to platform and from forum to forum. One common feature among all this variety is the use of capitalization, punctuation, and grammar to indicate tone and thus communicate better. The format of the text becomes part of the message. People TYPE LIKE THIS to show they’re shouting, use multiple punctuation marks to indicate confusion or excitement, and deliberately use bad grammar to show how worked up they are. For example, the famous Tumblr-ism “I can’t even” indicates such a high level of emotion that one is incapable of typing correctly.

Most of the resources on this language profusion are informal and online, since academic institutions can’t keep up with its evolution. In fact, the internet has its own resources to track these innovations—sites like “Know Your Meme” archive the course and meaning of these linguistic novelties. Wow! That’s some pretty cool stuff, right?

Well, not everyone is excited. Every time a piece of internet-speak becomes part of everyday language, it’s met by a reactionary and boring outcry equalled only by Pluto’s de-planet-ing. When teens use text-speak in verbal communication, self-proclaimed “defenders of the English language” are quick to prophecy doom. When “trigger warnings” moved from the computer to the campus, columnists wrote panicky op-eds about how this bare-minimum of human courtesy was “destroying the freedom of speech at universities.” When “selfie” was added to the Oxford English Dictionary, people furiously blogged that they “didn’t want to live on this planet anymore,” blissfully unaware that their very response was a well-worn internet meme.

The people who complain about the fruits of internet communication usually appeal to the Great Authors of Yesteryear, imagining them frowning down from the afterlife like your disappointed relatives. That’s where we get cultural products like the Shakespeare notebook, aimed at telling the ignorant masses that the owners of said notebooks are too smart for the sheep-like embrace of internet linguistics.

There’s one problem here—few artists became great by sticking to well-worn linguistic clichés. Shakespeare added over 1,700 words to the English language, many of them (to the delight of my internet-linguist soul) by turning nouns into verbs. And if we want to talk about linguistic prestige, Shakespeare’s plays were seen as lowbrow entertainment for the masses, and the Puritans hated them so much they literally closed all the theatres. In fact, critics like John Dryden basically thought Shakespeare was ruining the language through his shoddy grammar. In other words, language changes, and linguistic reactionaries aren’t the ones making cool things.

This doesn’t mean that we have to uncritically embrace internet-ese. I personally love hearing debates about how online surfing is changing our attention spans and the pros and cons of brief, Twitter-style communication. But it’s boring and wrong to look at this as the simple “dumbing down” of our generation. You can’t deny that people are making a functional, sometimes even beautiful dialect out of the bare bones of online communication.

So I hope my kids talk in an idiolect that I barely understand. I hope that every noun they verb makes the moral puritans of the age cry and gnash their teeth.

After all, “to be or not to be” is under 140 characters.