English and Leetspeak: A Step Towards Global Nerdism? (original) (raw)
It is common for any language to develop different speech styles that are to be used depending on the situation. Different groups of people, be it a professional milieu or a city district, tend to create new modalities of the language. We call those slang or jargon. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, a jargon would be "special words and phrases which are used by particular groups of people", and its main difference with slang would lie in the familiarity of this last one, as well as in the use itself of this speech: Cambridge Dictionary states very clearly that slang "is usually spoken rather than written". However, this definition is somehow incomplete if we think of the greatest phenomenon of our era, that is, the Internet. In this Research Article, a special jargon born on the Web and its possible influence on English will be the main focus.