1. How language is changing The internet as a threat to language Infuriating pedants

THE INFLUENCE OF BUSINESS AND DIPLOMATIC AND INTERNET TO CHANGE THE LANGUAGE
Plan:
1. How language is changing
2. The internet as a threat to language
3. Infuriating pedants

Prevalent use of the internet has spawned a number of linguistic conventions, many of which could have lasting impact on language.

Use of digital devices and the many opportunities for communication occasioned by the internet have required language to jump through many different hoops.
People are communicating with people they would never have communicated with previously: Hinglish speakers are chatting to Canadian Celine Dion fans in music web forums, Nigerian ‘Yahoo boys’ (internet con men) are messaging online daters in Scotland, Filipino virtual assistants are managing electronic diaries for Silicon Valley executives and German internet shoppers are reading product descriptions on Ebay written by Chinese entrepreneurs.
All these communication transactions bring us into contact with speakers of our language that we probably wouldn’t have encountered before the development of the World Wide Web.
How language is changing
Now that people are communicating in written form as never before, truncated turns of phrase and space- or keystroke-, efficient emoticons, and acronyms have become mainstream.
Facebook has given a different nuance to familiar words such as status, post and tag.
It’s perhaps right that Facebook should be one of the most influential sites: according to the Huffington Post, if Facebook were a country, it would be the most populated in the world.
This means Facebook would rank above both China and India in population terms; ironically India’s contribution to the English language has been fairly sizeable and includes words that form the cornerstones of the internet, such as avatar and guru.
Whilst conventions such as ‘KR’ for ‘kind regards’ at the foot of an email are fairly widespread, some codes of speech and abbreviations don’t always stray outside particular online communities. Outside Mumsnet, few people know what DD and DS mean (Darling Daughter and Darling Son), however the internet also promotes the spread of slang terms that in previous times may have remained unique to smaller, local populations.
LOL (an acronym of ‘Laugh Out Loud’) is now regularly referred to by mainstream media, having spread beyond the social media platforms such as Tumblr and Reddit that almost definitely helped popularise the term. But as the internet matures, online conventions are also evolving over time.
LOL used to be a way to acknowledge, with only three keystrokes, that you found another web user’s input amusing. This term now seems to have undergone a semantic shift. It’s now more of a way to signal that a comment is intended to be funny, or to signal irony.
That change seems to have occurred within a short space of time and may have occurred as the use of LOL spread outside its original community to be adopted by a wider audience for their own use.