Indonesian Journal of Applied Linguistics, Vol. 7 No. 3, January 2018, pp. 727-736 727 EVOLUTION OF ENGLISH IN THE INTERNET AGE Abdu M. Talib Al-Kadi 1 Rashad Ali Ahmed 2 ISLT, Carthage University, Tunisia 1 The University of Memphis, USA 2 findtalib@gmail.com 1 ; raahmed@memphis.edu 2 First received: 17 July 2017 Final proof received: 31 January 2018 Abstract Although the Internet came into existence in the second half of the twentieth century, its influence on language began to escalate in 1990 onwards. It has drastically changed the way people communicate and use English both in writing and speaking. Consequently, the world has become increasingly interconnected through synchronous and asynchronous communicational scripts, such as SMS, online chat, Yahoo messengers, emails, blogs, and wikis, which have become retrievable as accessible corpora for analysis. These corpora can yield anecdotal evidence of historical language change. The arrival of Web 2.0 tools and applications, such as Facebook, Twitter, Skype, WhatsApp, and Viber, can likewise reveal changes that English has recently undergone. The Internet has given rise to what is arguably a new variety of English that differs from standard varieties. This article provides an account of the development of English from dialects spoken by a small number of people in the British Isles to an international and global language. It emphasizes the language shifts that have taken place more recently since the widespread use of the Internet. The pervasiveness of the Internet has led to new changes in form and usage described as Internet English. Keywords: CMC; electronic English; internetese; history of English; textese From the eighteenth to the twentieth century, colonial and economic expansion saw the English language spread rapidly across the world to become a global language when the Internet was conceived. While all languages change over time, the Internet has introduced a new medium for these changes to take place. Since the Internet became publicly available, English spelling, pronunciation, vocabularies, and grammar, have changed, resulting in conflicting views and debate among language researchers and pundits. Some language researchers (e.g. Ali, 2012; Kern, 2006) alleged that the development of new English varieties, under the influence of the Internet, is a threat to the standard varieties of English. Such arguments emanate from the fact that the Internet English used on a daily basis today often does not conform to the standard varieties. On the other hand, established language researchers, such as David Crystal (2001, 2005, 2011), believe Internet English to be a linguistic revolution. To Crystal, these changes in English form and usage have given birth to a new branch of linguistics he calls Internet Linguistics. In academia today, Internet Linguistics is widely discussed within the realm of computer-mediated communication (CMC), digital communication, or the term, computer-mediated discourse analysis (CMDA) as coined by Herring (2001). This paper intends to provide a bird’s-eye view of the evolution of English in the Internet age with a focus on current stances. It analyses some recent linguistic research articles that have been conducted to identify common features of most recent linguistic phenomena in Late Modern English that coincided with the emergence of the Internet. Though it is hard to precisely determine the first existence of the Internet, this study highlights the language changes which became into effect under the influence of the internet invasion. It explores the historical developments in the English language as influenced by digital technology. The paper is specially intended to English learners taking courses in the history of English. It reads like an Introductory History of the English Language with a special focus on the period of the arrival of the Internet and WWW as the landmark in the many digital technologies. Rationale Being teachers of English, the authors felt the need for a summary of the history of English language so as to make L2 learners aware of the different varieties of English they deal with in their written texts; either those ancient literary texts such the Chaucerian Canterbury Tales, Shakespearean plays, T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land or the current frequently used short messaging, emojis, and so on. This endeavor takes a historical perspective. It traces major changes that have taken place in English driven by the Internet in terms of spelling, pronunciation, grammar, the introduction of new e- terms, the evolution of cybergenres, and digital tenor (Posteguillo, 2002). The study of such changes is rationalized by the fact that knowing the rules and doi: 10.17509/ijal.v7i3.9823