198 LANGUAGE AND THE INTERNET
varieties of written expression are legal, religious, journalistic, lit-
erary, and scientific texts. These are all widely present in their many
sub-varieties, or genres. Under the heading of religion, for instance,
we can find a wide range of liturgical forms, rituals, prayers, sacred
texts, preaching, doctrinal statements, and private affirmations of
belief. Each of these genres has its distinctive linguistic charac-
ter, and all of this stylistic variation will be found on the Web. If
we visit a Web site,^4 such as the British Library or the Library of
Congress, and call up their catalogues, what we find is exactly the
same kind of language as we would if we were to visit these loca-
tions in London or Washington, even down to the use of different
conventions of spelling and punctuation. The range of the Web
extends from the huge database to the individual self-published
‘home page’, and presents contributions from every kind of de-
signer and stylist, from the most professional to the linguistically
and graphically least gifted. It thus defies stylistic generalization.
All of this is obvious, and yet in its very obviousness there is an im-
portant point to be made: in its linguistic character, seen through
its linked pages, the Web is an analogue of the written language
that is already ‘out there’ in the paper-based world. For the most
part, what we see on Web pages is a familiar linguistic world. If
we are looking for Internet distinctiveness, novelty, and idiosyn-
crasy – or wishing to find fuel for a theory of impending linguistic
doom (p. 1) – we are not likely to find it here.
But distinctiveness there is. If the Web holds a mirror up to our
linguistic nature, it is a mirror that both distorts and enhances,
providing new constraints and opportunities. It constrains, first of
all, in that we see language displayed within the physical limitations
of a monitor screen, and subjected to a user-controlled movement
(scrolling) – chiefly vertical, sometimes horizontal – that has no real
precedent (though the rolled documents of ancient and mediaeval
(^4) AWeb siteis an individual computer holding documents capable of being transferred to
and presented by browsers, using one of the standard formats (usually HTML or XML).
Web sites are identified by a unique address, or URL (Uniform Resource Locator), with
different pages of data at the site distinguished by means of labels separated by forward
slashes.