Orthography is just the spelling part of the language.
But there's a lot of change to the vocabulary because of internet (new term adoption and foreign word travel are now much faster).
There are also several new syntactic forms (e.g. in memes etc) that might still appear "out of the language" for the more conservative, but are inevitable destined to become part of it as the generations grown with them mature (and they are already all over even "traditional" print media, books, etc. -- even bizarro forms like "doge speak").
And since english is the dominant web/movies/pop culture language, even more change has incurred in smaller languages, where turns of phrase and syntactic forms from english adopted wholesale by younger speakers ("anglicisms").
Also, I know German people who find it easier to have conversations on some subjects in English, even between native German speakers. I can't work out if this is the equivalent of chefs having to learn French; the language of technology is English, so if you want to talk about tech, you need to learn English. Or whether the world's language is becoming more Anglicised and so it's just easier to use English for modern conversations.
Do you have a source for this?
> There are also several new syntactic forms (e.g. in memes etc) that might still appear "out of the language" for the more conservative, but are inevitable destined to become part of it as the generations grown with them mature (and they are already all over even "traditional" print media, books, etc. -- even bizarro forms like "doge speak").
So there are new styles which appear which impose additional constraints upon language (e.g. doge speak). Such things have arisen at previous points in time (different poetry styles).
Again, I'm not saying that the things you point to aren't interesting or aren't worthy of study. But I think calling them 'language change' is a mislabelling.
'normal' writing v text speak or leet speak would seem to be a better example?
For ancient civilizations (pre 3000 B.C) when it was all about the oral language, maybe.
We've moved way beyond that, and orthography is not a pure recording medium, but it's forms are historically tied to the language and its development (including borrowings from other languages). All kinds of continuity is lost if you "switch" orthography en masse (instead of organically).
And it's more like using guitars or synths, or B-3 vs Rhodes to play the same melody, than mp3 vs magnetic tape. The timbre when you change orthography is not the same -- something most poets, writers etc, would be quick to point out.
Moving to consistent spellings obscured the origins of English words maybe as often as it illuminated them.
which isn't to say that orthography (or fonts) aren't interesting.
Interesting hypothesis.
I don't think I do, and my assumption is that most other people don't either?
I learnt to speak well before I learnt to read and write. The process of speaking without any knowledge of the letters was deeply embedded in my brain.
People that are unable as adults to read or write, or have severe impediments to reading/writing in the same way that I do (e.g. dyslexia) don't speak any differently.
If I try to, I can picture how my spoken word is written down, but I'm pretty sure when I'm talking in a more "autonomic" fashion I'm not really picturing the words?
On the other hand, what strikes me as a contribution of Internet to the language is our capacity to communicate through videos and pictures. Which means that our vocabulary is narrower. I don't have to be so elaborate when describing my room; I can just take a picture, and tweet it.
Not really, actually. To illustrate, if someone asked me what "diarrhea" means, I would answer quickly that it's having a stomachache and runny shits, and it would be an adequate definition, even though I would have to take a moment to figure out its spelling and even then I won't be certain.
And that era was a primitive, oral tradition, era. Just because something emerged later doesn't mean it's not as deep, or even more important, than what was there previously. Else gestures and groans would be even "deeper" than language (they are with us for hundreds of thousands of years before language).
Also many would argue that orthography is not just "what font you use for writing code", but has deeper connections with the language (historical and etymological for one, orthography gives us hints about the meaning and etymology of words).
Text is king, people don't talk on the phone any more, we text each other. I think I type at least as many words as I speak every day, and on some reclusive days, many, many more.
And because people infer emotional content from subtle cues in text, orthography is important now.
You don't talk to anyone?
It's not just because orthography emerged later, but because it's entirely parasitic upon actual language. It's simply a representation, so the font metaphor is entirely appropriate. The representation can be changed in arbitrary ways that don't really affect the underlying structure.