Virtual spelling

(Photo: East New )

The Internet, which emerged and began to develop in the 70s as one of the auxiliary communication and information storage systems in the American defense-scientific complex, is now spreading its influence at a truly amazing speed, invading and creeping into all spheres of human existence. However, while the World Wide Web is a new object for the vast majority of current users, it inevitably gives rise to a certain number of myths in the mass consciousness. The Internet still remains the most striking symbol of the coming information age, a kind of fetish, participation in which increases the status of “initiates.” And if there are initiates, there is a special language, or rather, jargon.

However, jargon is perhaps not quite the right word. In linguistics, this term means the speech of any social or other group united by common interests, containing many words and expressions different from the common language, including artificial, sometimes conventional. At the same time, the paralinguistic means of people communicating in jargon are not fundamentally different from those used by all other representatives of the human race. The Internet, the speed of communication in which leads to an almost forced blurring of the boundaries between written and spoken language, has created a special type of jargon.

A specialist will immediately object that in fiction there are many examples of imitation or imitation of oral speech (they are called skaz): this is exactly how Zoshchenko wrote many of his works, for example. But any imitation is subject to literary laws and still has little in common with real colloquial speech. Let's see what happens if we try to actually convey spoken language in writing, while keeping it understandable for the interlocutor - millions of people actively using fast text Internet communication tools (IRC, Usenet conferences, WWW) have taken part in this experience in recent years -chat rooms and forums, all types of instant messengers - ICQ, AIM, etc.).

Oral spoken language is multichannel. In dialogue, not only the organs of speaking and hearing are used, but also vision (often smell and touch). Observant people know that vision is, although not the main, but extremely important information channel in conversational communication, and without paralinguistic factors, the conversation often does not develop or does not develop as desired. In addition, we must not forget that speaking itself is not only the transmission of words as such, but also intonation, which plays an important role in understanding, but is also practically not conveyed in writing. In the book “The Language of Relationships (Men and Women)” by famous American authors Allan and Barbara Pease, it is stated that when communicating face-to-face, the perception of the message is due to wordless signals by 60-80%, due to tonality - by 20-30%. Only the remaining 7-10% of information is perceived from the words themselves. With certain variations, approximately the same data can be found from other researchers. Of course, only the transmission of printed characters is still possible on the Internet (the vast mass of private users with “telephone” access cannot participate in video conferences organized via the Internet). The fundamental impossibility of gesture, facial expressions, “playing with the eyes” and intonation deprives the “speaker” of the opportunity to fix the semantic points of the utterance, opening up unwanted scope for interpretation, being a constant source of ambiguity. Therefore, just as in ordinary written speech diacritics are used to convey sound features, in online speaking, on the one hand, not only letters, but also other symbols on the keyboard are widely used; and on the other hand, literary norms are deliberately ignored, but not just anyhow - this has its own system.

So, "emoticons". This word is derived from the English “smile” (smile) and denotes the entirety of the “non-verbal” part of written communication transmitted using auxiliary keyboard symbols. Dictionaries of “emoticons” can be easily found on the Internet; neophytes, amazed by the unusual language of the old-timers of the Internet, love to post them on their websites (a typical example is goldfish.newmail.ru/smile.htm ). Emoticons are designed to create the illusion of simultaneous speaking and action. It, in turn, provides the desired effect of presence. In fact, if the speed of a letter sent by e-mail is measured not in weeks, as previously with “paper” ones, and not even in days, and not even in hours, but in minutes, all the epistolary art accumulated over centuries immediately loses its meaning and requires replacing itself with new forms. There is no point in drawing a “smiley” on a paper letter - what do we really care, in our age of speed, whether the interlocutor smiled a week ago when writing this particular phrase or not? Time has passed, and the communicative charge of a smile along with it. It’s not like that now: receiving and sending letters at intervals of a couple of minutes (what letters? Notes!), we communicate with the interlocutor almost in real time, and therefore we urgently need to “see” him - in order to better understand.

Roman Leibov, a well-known “veteran” of the Russian Internet (philologist, University of Tartu), wrote two years ago ( Internet magazine, N4 ): “Smiles, unnoticed by you, penetrate into your completely paper letters, and one day you discover them in his official correspondence with his bewildered superiors." Or, let’s add, the bosses discover them in their correspondence with subordinates - which is not a loss of face. I would like to note that since the myth about the special significance of the Network is actively exploited by all interested parties and structures, “emoticons” easily enter into the written speech of even people who tend to believe their speech is a literary norm. And even if they don’t appear later in writing in inappropriate situations, they still influence speech indirectly - the substitution has already taken place, the art of expressing one’s emotions only in words is gradually disappearing.

Intonation, in turn, is expressed in written spoken Internet speech by underscores (analogous to italics) and capital letters (the author of these lines, when creating the forum on the Itogi website, first of all added to the rules the clause “Do not type your messages in capital letters, otherwise your interlocutors get the impression that you are SCREAMING all the time.") The choice of means, you will agree, is not particularly diverse - but to some extent it unifies the understanding of the emotions attached to the text even by people of different cultures.

Finally, deliberate irregularities are introduced into speech (bringing what is written closer to what is “audible” - for example, “patamushta”, “pasib”, “kaneshna”, “lana”, etc.) and numerous abbreviations, mainly originally from English, but losing use due to age Latin spelling and capitalization of letters (let's say, IMHO - in the original IMHO, "in my humble opinion" - a politeness formula, literally meaning "in my humble opinion").
Finally, as in any independent jargon, in Internet speech there is an active process of formation of neologisms, and they are not always of English origin ("browser", "use"), and even if so, they are often "tested" in Russian until complete unrecognizability (for example, “ICQ” (from ICQ) already means any instant online text communication program). Of course, “emoticons” are unlikely to flow into the normative literary language, but the diffusion of neologisms from the jargon used by a large and socially active group is completely inevitable. It’s just that its path will be a little longer - first from quasi-oral speech simply to oral speech, and then to dictionaries.

October 12, 2000