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English has become a common language for internet users from around the world. In the process, the language itself is changing.

When America emerged from the ashes of a bruising war with Britain in 1814, the nation was far from united. Noah Webster thought that a common language would bring people together and help create a new identity that would make the country truly independent of the British.

Webster’s dictionary, now in its 11th edition, adopted the Americanized spellings familiar today – er instead of re in theatre, dropping the u from colour, and losing the double l from words such as traveller. It also documented new words that were uniquely American such as skunk, opossum, hickory, squash and chowder.

An American Dictionary of the English Language took 18 years to complete and Webster learned 26 other languages in order to research the etymology of its 70,000 entries.

The internet is creating a similar language evolution, but at a much faster pace.

There are now thought to be some 4.5 billion web pages worldwide. And with half the population of China now on line, most of them are written in Chinese.

Still, some linguists predict that within 10 years English will dominate the internet – but in forms very different to what we accept and recognize as English today.

That’s because people who speak English as a second language already outnumber native speakers. And increasingly they use it to communicate with other non-native speakers, particularly on the internet where less attention is paid to grammar and spelling and users don’t have to worry about their accent.

“The internet enfranchises people who are not native speakers to use English in significant and meaningful ways,” says Naomi Baron, professor of linguistics at American University in Washington DC.

Users of Facebook already socialize in a number of different “Englishes” including Indian English, or Hinglish, Spanglish (Spanish English) and Konglish (Korean English). While these variations have long existed within individual cultures, they’re now expanding and comingling online.

“On the internet, all that matters is that people can communicate – nobody has a right to tell them what the language should be,” says Prof. Naomi Baron.

“If you can talk Facebook into putting up pages, you have a language that has political and social standing even if it doesn’t have much in the way of linguistic uniqueness.”

Some words are adaptations of traditional English: In Singlish, or Singaporean English, “blur” means “confused” or “slow”:

“She came into the conversation late and was blur as a result.”

Others combine English words to make something new. In Konglish, “skinship” means intimate physical contact: handholding, touching, caressing.

Technology companies are tapping into the new English variations with products aimed at enabling users to add words that are not already in the English dictionary.

And most large companies have English websites, while smaller businesses are learning that they need a common language – English – to reach global customers.

“While most people don’t speak English as their first language, there is a special commercial and social role for English driven by modern forms of entertainment,” says Robert Munro, a computational linguist and head of Idibon, a language technology company in California.

“The prevalence of English movies in regions where there is not much technology other than cell phones and DVDs makes English an aspirational language. People think it’s the language of the digital age.”

In previous centuries, the convergence of cultures and trade led to the emergence of pidgin – a streamlined system of communication that has simple grammatical structure, says Michael Ullman, director of research at George Washington University’s Brain and Language Lab.

When the next generation of pidgin speakers begins to add vocabulary and grammar, it becomes a distinct Creole language.

“You get different endings, it’s more complex and systematized. Something like that could be happening to English on the web,” he says.

Take Hinglish.

Hinglish is a blend of Hindi, Punjabi, Urdu and English and is so widespread that it’s even being taught to British diplomats.

Mobile phone companies are also updating their apps to reflect its growing use.

In Hinglish, a co-brother is a brother-in-law; eve-teasing means sexual harassment; an emergency crew responding to a crisis might be described as “airdashing”, and somewhat confusing to football fans, a “stadium” refers to a bald man with a fringe of hair. There’s even a new concept of time – “pre-pone”, the opposite of postpone, meaning “to bring something forward”.

The increasing prevalence of the internet in everyday life means that language online is not a zero sum game. Instead, it allows multiple languages to flourish.

“Most people actually speak multiple languages – it’s less common to only speak one,” says Robert Munro.

“English has taken its place as the world’s lingua franca, but it’s not pushing out other languages.”

Instead, other languages are pushing their way into English, and in the process creating something new.

A new research has found that modern Indo-European languages – which include English – originated in Turkey about 9,000 years ago.

Researchers’ findings differ from conventional theory that these languages originated 5,000 years ago in south-west Russia.

The New Zealand researchers used methods developed to study virus epidemics to create family trees of ancient and modern Indo-European tongues to pinpoint where and when the language family first arose.

Their study is reported in Science.

A language family is a group of languages that arose from a common ancestor, known as the proto-language.

Linguists identify these families by trawling through modern languages for words of similar sound that often describe the same thing, like water and wasser (German). These shared words – or cognates – represent our language inheritance.

A new research has found that modern Indo-European languages, which include English, originated in Turkey about 9,000 years ago

A new research has found that modern Indo-European languages, which include English, originated in Turkey about 9,000 years ago

According to the Ethnologue database, more than 100 language families exist.

The Indo-European family is one of the largest families – more than 400 languages spoken in at least 60 countries – and its origins are unclear.

The Steppes, or Kurgan, theorists hold that the proto-language originated in the Steppes of Russia, north of the Caspian Sea, about 5,000 years ago.

The Anatolia hypothesis – first proposed in the late 1980s by Prof. Colin Renfrew (now Lord Renfrew) – suggests an origin in the Anatolian region of Turkey about 3,000 years earlier.

To determine which competing theory was the most likely, Dr. Quentin Atkinson from the University of Auckland and his team interrogated language evolution using phylogenetic analyses – more usually used to trace virus epidemics.

Phylogenetics reveals relatedness by assessing how much of the information stored in DNA is shared between organisms.

Chimpanzees and humans have a common ancestor and share about 98% of their DNA. Because of this shared ancestry, they cluster together on phylogenetic – or family – trees.

Like DNA, language is passed down, generation to generation.

Although language changes and evolves, some linguists have argued that cognates describing the fundamentals of life – kinship (mother, father), body parts (eye, hand), the natural world (fire, water) and basic verbs (to walk, to run) – resist change.

These conserved cognates are strongly linked to the proto-language of old.

Dr. Quentin Atkinson and his team built a database containing 207 cognate words present in 103 Indo‐European languages, which included 20 ancient tongues such as Latin and Greek.

Using phylogenetic analysis, they were able to reconstruct the evolutionary relatedness of these modern and ancient languages – the more words that are cognate, the more similar the languages are and the closer they group on the tree.

The trees could also predict when and where the ancestral language originated.

Looking back into the depths of the tree, Dr. Quentin Atkinson and his colleagues were able to confirm the Anatolian origin.

To test if the alternative hypothesis – of a Russian origin several years later – was possible, the team used competing models of evolution to pitch Steppes and Anatolian theory against each other.

In repeated tests, the Anatolian theory always came out on top.

However, the findings have not found universal acceptance. Prof. Petri Kallio from the University of Helsinki suggests that several cognate words describing technological inventions – such as the wheel – are evident across different languages.

He argues that the Indo-European proto-language diversified after the invention of the wheel, about 5,000 years ago.

On the phylogenetic methods used to date the proto-language, Prof. Petri Kallio added: “So why do I still remain skeptical? Unlike archaeological radiocarbon dating based on the fixed rate of decay of the carbon-14 isotope, there is simply no fixed rate of decay of basic vocabulary, which would allow us to date ancestral proto-languages.

“Instead of the quantity of the words, therefore, the trained Indo-Europeanists concentrate on the quality of the words.”