238 LANGUAGE AND THE INTERNET
of this book, a range of intriguingly new and still evolving linguistic
varieties, characterized by sets of specific adaptations, in graphol-
ogy, grammar, semantics, and discourse, to the properties of the
technology and the needs of the user. They suggest an answer to
the second of the two questions I raised in chapter 1 (p. 9): is the
Internet emerging as a homogenous linguistic medium or is it a col-
lection of distinct dialects? The latter, surely, is the case. Although
there are a few properties which different Internet situations seem
to share, these do not in aggregate make a very strong case for a
view of Netspeak as a variety. But if Netspeak is not a variety, what
is it? Is there anything at all to be said, if we step back from the
detail of these situations, and ‘take a view’ about Internet language
as a whole? The first question I asked on p. viii was whether the
‘electronic revolution’ was bringing about a linguistic revolution.
The evidence suggests that it is. The phenomenon of Netspeak is
going to ‘change the way we think’ about language in a fundamental
way, because it is a linguistic singularity – a genuine new medium.
At various places in this book, linguists, stylists, editors, and
other observers have groped for analogies to express what they find
in Internet language, and have failed. The kind of language which is
on the Internet in its different situations, though displaying some
similarities with other forms of communication, is fundamentally
differentfromthem.Comparisonswithnote-taking,letter-writing,
amateur radio, citizens’-band radio, and all the other communica-
tive acts mentioned in earlier chapters prove to be singularly unillu-
minating. For Netspeak is something completely new. It is neither
‘spoken writing’ nor ‘written speech’. As I argued in chapter 2, it is
something fundamentally different from both writing and speech,
as traditionally understood. It is, in short, a fourth medium. In lan-
guage studies, we are used to discussing issues in terms of ‘speech
vs. writing vs. signing’. From now on we must add a further dimen-
sion to comparative enquiry: ‘spoken language vs. written language
vs. sign language vs. computer-mediated language’.^22 Netspeak is a
(^22) Acontrastisintendedherewith‘computer-mediatedcommunication’,whichincludesthe
whole range of communicative expression (pictures, music, etc.), whether linguistically