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GROWING UP DIGITAL, WIRED FOR DISTRACTION—that’s the way the New York Times headlined its front-page analysis of the situation in Redwood City, located in California’s Silicon Valley.21 The story said the lure of computers and cell phones, particularly texting, is beating out the desire for an education, not to mention the need for physical exercise.

At the same time, these students and their parents are among other Americans at the forefront of fashioning the new world language. Without realizing it, they are helping to create today’s substitute for formal English.

The process of spawning a new language used to average about 1,600 years, according to linguist Robin Dunbar.22 Now it takes only a tiny fraction of that total, just enough for the computer world to lay the groundwork.

TOO MANY BLACKBERRYS

Ariana Huffington, the founder of the popular Huffington Post blog, is proof that too many Blackberrys can be harmful to your health. She was trying to keep up with three of them when she passed out from exhaustion and broke her cheekbone.

She says her first therapy was to charge her batteries in a separate room from where she slept. She then decided to go comparatively naked telephonically by dispensing with the third phone.

Alas, the divorce didn’t work. She says she’s back to three intimate companions and risking turning the other cheek into shreds.

LIKE A REVOLUTION

By 2004, Crystal concluded that such massive changes in language truly amounted to a “revolution” because there was “so little continuity with previous communicative behavior.”23 By that he meant that for the first time you could now have a “conversation” by texting or e-mailing without actually seeing or hearing the other person involved. And for the first time you could have more than one conversation simultaneously, with the response time now anywhere from less than a minute to a month or more.

The fact that there were now more users of English as a second language than as a first language was, to Crystal, also “without precedent.” The ratio of second-language speakers to first-tier ones had reached the astounding figure of three to one. Never had any language attained such dominance.

Crystal also found that “English as a lingua franca was developing a new linguistic character,” due not only to the massive input from the United States but from the regional dialects of Australia, India, South Africa, and other countries. He called the result “a hybrid without a name.”24

The hybrid has become even more prominent in non-English-speaking countries, which stretch far from Europe where English is clearly the second language for nearly everybody. The new lingo has been especially welcomed in countries like China and Japan, where the contrast in language structure is greatest.

Cutting across all these factors is the generational one: the huge linguistic gap between younger and older people of all nationalities. The former tend to experiment and seek change; the latter tend to resist change and stick with the status quo. The youth factor is a major force in spreading English to non-English-speaking countries.

TOWARD A WORLD TONGUE

Throughout modern world history, languages followed explorers and traders. The linguistic seeds especially helped spread Spanish, English, French, Dutch, Chinese, and Portuguese to their colonies.

But these trading centers generally remained isolated linguistically from each other, despite some interactions in pidgin dialects. No one country or language dominated the world.

For several centuries, French was considered the lingua franca, the language of international diplomacy. But that began to change at the end of World War I when the Versailles Peace Treaty was written in both French and English, largely because of the huge contribution to victory provided by Britain and the United States.

Since World War II, American English has been the common language for almost every international activity, whether it be diplomacy, trade, advertising, technology,