Hmm …

… How the internet is changing language as we know it (ikr lol) | Books | The Guardian. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… it shouldn’t be so surprising that young women are among the most adept users of internet English. It’s a truism in sociolinguistics that young women are usually on the bleeding edge of changes to language – native speakers of the avant garde. McCulloch cites one study of letters written between 1417 and 1681 that shows it was female correspondents who were the first to adopt new words such as “does”, “has” and “makes” and phase out “doth” “hath” and “maketh”. Likewise, uptalking – where every sentence sounds like a question – originated in suburban California in the 1970s, and can now be heard among middle-aged English males. Still, fears that formal language is about to undergo some radical shift are misplaced. As McCulloch demonstrates, most of the innovations in internet English mimic features that come naturally in informal speech – emoji represent gestures; upper and lower cases represent tones; punctuation represents emphasis. Full internet people are perfectly capable of writing in full sentences when the situation demands. 

I, of course, have to look up a lot of the abbreviations commonly used on the internet. Oh, well. I’m old.