看网络发展如何改变语言

"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, a language technology company in California.
“虽然大多数人的母语都不是英语，但现代娱乐方式让英语发挥着特殊的商业和社会作用，” 加利福尼亚一家名为Idibon的语言公司的老总，计算机语言学家罗伯特-芒罗说。

"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."
“在一些除了手机和DVD外没有其他什么高科技产品的地区，英语电影的流行让英语成为一种时尚。人们认为这是数字时代的语言。”

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 Georgetown University's Brain and Language Lab.
过去几个世纪，文化和商贸的融合导致了洋泾浜语的产生，这是一种简洁实用的交流语言，语法结构简单，乔治城大学大脑和语言实验室的主任迈克尔-厄尔曼这样解释道。

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 systematised. Something like that could be happening to English on the web," he says.
下一代的洋泾浜语言使用者还会为其继续增加词汇和语法，它会变成一种截然不同的克里奥尔语。“洋泾浜语会有不同的形式，会更加复杂和系统化。对于英语，这种变化会发生在互联网上，”他说。

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.
以印式英语为例，印式英语是北印度语、旁遮普语、乌尔都语和英语的混合语，它使用很广泛，甚至被教给英国外交官。

Mobile phone companies are also updating their apps to reflect its growing use.
移动电话公司也在不断更新应用程序，以体现他们日益增多的功能。

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".
在印式英语中，co-brother意为姐夫、妹夫或小舅子；eve-teasing意为性骚扰；紧急救援队对突发事件的反应可能会被描述为 airdashing，而令球迷有些困惑的是，stadium指的是头发稀疏的秃顶男人。就连表示时间都有新的概念——pre-pone，延期的反义词，意为“提前”。

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.
互联网在日常生活中的日益普遍意味着语言并非一场零和博弈。相反，它让不同的语言蓬勃发展。

"Most people actually speak multiple languages - it's less common to only speak one," says Mr Munro. "English has taken its place as the world's lingua franca, but it's not pushing out other languages."
“实际上，很多人都会说多种语言，只会说一种语言的人是很少见的。” 芒罗先生说。“英语已经成为世界的通用语，但它并不排挤其他语言。”

Instead, other languages are pushing their way into English, and in the process creating something new.
相反，其他语言正在融入英语当中，在此过程中也在不断产生新的东西。