Spell Checkers and the International Language
At the moment there is a disparity between America and English spellings and the meaning of certain words. It won’t last long. Spellings, and I believe national languages, will start to merge into one international language — leaving cultural slang as the language alternatives.
The cause is the Internet. Television started to do it, but the Internet actively encourages it.
As an example, I’ve just downloaded the new version of my browser (Firefox 2.0). This new version has a built in spell checker loaded with American English. Whenever I type a word like realise it underlines it in red, and tells me the correct spelling uses a ‘z’. I’ve started to add the British versions of spellings, but to be honest I read so many American sites that I’m confusing myself.
And to be honest I don’t think it really matters. It’s not like I’m using text message (txt msg) language which is incomprehensible at times. Neither spelling is better or worse; they’re just different. Why not use some of the American spellings? (Other than because I want to hold onto my British identity.)
There’s actually a problem with us all using different spellings when we are using search engines: different spellings bring up different results. Not too long ago website writers actually had to actively misspell words in order to capture some of the misspelt search queries. Now Google has the ‘did you mean’ feature, that’s less necessary.
This is just the beginning though. Maybe translation software will reach a stage where we can communicate effectively between languages, but translations have never been particularly accurate even when using a human translator. It’s impossible to get the nuances of meaning through in a translation. If we start communicating with each other more, it only makes sense to start sharing a language.
Will that mean we turn to English as the primary form of communication? It happened with Science, but that was mainly because the Church didn’t understand English.
No, in a multicultural world I think we will start to see languages combining more. Well, that’s nothing really new since English is already a hybrid language. But it will become much more so.
I already regularly say math instead of maths, but the merging of British and American English is hardly a big change. The big change will happen gradually, but it will speed up as more and more of us are able to communicate with each other. If I can say enough in Chinese to have a basic conversation I will want to learn more words. But the process has to be two way, or it will just be me learning Chinese.
A cultural shift is something else entirely. A cultural shift has to be driven by something. The Internet will be involved. Multiculturalism will be involved. Globalisation will be involved. But something else must be involved, because the step from Chinese to English is currently far too large.
It takes something small like a spell checker to make the change. It takes small steps. One word at a time. In fact, it’s probably happening already without us really noticing it.