Burke’s Blog

What Will Become of Language?

I used to drive into Mobile, AL every day for work and ideas were constantly entering my mind about websites that are centered on the people and businesses of Mobile .  There’s one problem though when looking for appropriate Web addresses for my ideas: all of the sites with the word, “Mobile,” in them have been taken by the mobile technology industry.   There’s T-Mobile, mobile.yahoo.com, www.google.com/mobile- you get the idea.

Thus began my concern for the future of language. In 7-bit binary code, the letters “M, o, b, i, l, and e” are represented as follows:

100 1101 110 1111 110 0010 110 1001 110 1100 110 0101

This is as true for writing “Mobile, AL” as it is “Mobile phones…” at the beginning of a sentence or anywhere else the “M” is capitalized.  When it comes to search engines and Web addresses, capitalization is altogether ignored, compiling the problem even further.

The Internet is also inventing words. 20 years ago no one said “Google,” “Napster,” or “YouTube,” and the list goes on.  I suppose wherever you can balance consonants and vowels in a short snappy way you can create a new word now - for any purpose, with out any history, etymology, or philology getting in the way.  In a way it’s freeing, but in another way, in the long term, all of those consonant and vowel combinations are going to be taken up.  Perhaps we will start clicking like African bush men or start rolling our R’s more and have to create new characters in our alphabet. I r-l-r-l-really hope not, though.

Right now there is no shortage of URL’s for sale and for re-sale on Websites such as www.tdnam.com. Most of the URL’s are overpriced, and it is obvious why there seems to be very little re-selling actually occurring on these sites.  However, as time goes on I think there will be a boom in domain name sales.  There will be only so many combinations of letters that people will want to say, and a limit to the number of characters someone will want to type in.  I recently went on vacation in Paris and visited the shrine of St. Catherine Laboure - a beautiful chapel where her remains have remained incorrupt for over 130 years.  However, I can’t imagine the organization’s website gets much direct traffic - who wants to type in http://www.chapellenotredamedelamedaillemiraculeuse.com/?

Of course new extensions, like .com and .net, are being added all of the time.  There are different county codes like .ca ( Canada ) and .jp ( Japan ) and even some new extensions like .mobi (for mobile devices, not Mobile , AL ) and .asia.  As consonant and vowel combinations become scarce, who knows how many more extensions will become available?  But eventually, the stakeholders in these names will squeeze the World Wide Web Consortium (W3) so hard that they will ban the creation of new extensions.  The Internet was originally supposed to be free and open for use, but as money weaves it’s way through it, the day will change when owning domain names will be as valuable as owning a small piece of real estate (an God isn’t making any more of that either).

Words have always been a source of profit. A specialized vocabulary is the only thing that lawyers have that the rest of us don’t. But now, our entire culture is seeing a dramatic change in communication and the way that words are used. Pay close attention - it might pay off in the end.