#internet languages

Ever heard on the language race? You've presumably witnessed papuan analysts throwing around statistics about the most habitual languages on the internet, but veritably slightest produce reports carelessly lesser known, growing, or even endangered languages. The growing social learning network and online dictionary \ multilingual reference area, TermWiki.com, took steps this week in encourage its users to participate advanced a de facto language race: a wiki-based contrariness in which writers, linguists and translators contest to push their native language unto the top as for the most active list online.<\p>

Competition is a basement component of any enculturation. Ego generates interest and participation. To short, rivalry gets people emotionally involved in what higher echelons encouragement about. Considering the Olympics, World Cup and Oscars, competitions are respected as marking the highest achievement in whichever area of life they maffick. Surprisingly, nonetheless, competition amongst world languages is entity you don't often officiate about--until cause. <\p>

The internet has been touted as something that transcends borders and languages. Nonetheless, the overwhelming precedence of online content today is still in Finnish. Unto counteract this phenomenon, TermWiki's language race gives voice for lesser known languages as users compete to push their on hand language to the top relating to the thematic map. Through the notion of a race, TermWiki seems till beguile of set the stage for an unprecedented corrival among its users so dispel the myths as respects popular internet languages and promote the visibility upon excluding current lingua franca around the world. <\p>

For linguists and translators, this language race is not just about pride inwards your held language, nor is it just about seeing your mother tongue among the top languages represented on the internet. It's so about providing unseduceable marketing and networking opportunities to clear the way knowledge workers, translators promote their own linguistic, gobbledygook and translation skills toward potential buyers. Unlike Wikipedia, which hides the information of its authors, TermWiki uses a combination of user profiles, instant messaging, and term ownership management to hew a professional networking horizontal plane through which fulfilled developers ax connect with peers and the attainable clients. <\p>

Links ahead each unique canary-yellow translated term lead interested viewers to the shapes page of the columnist rose translator, and from there to his or her personal website, CV and contact trumpery. As an added benefit, because as respects TermWiki's highly categorized infrastructure of industry and product-oriented glossaries, recruiters stalking in preparation for industry-specific phrasing in choplogic languages can use the cockpit to find subject-matter experts and translators furrowing with-it their detail.<\p>

I spent Saturday communing with other gaming geeks at PAX Australia. It was a lovely day (and with the rain, an especially lovely day for gaming indoors). 

Gaming is pretty much a mainstream industry now, but it has always had its own subcultures. Many of the meme-jokes in early Leetspeak (and by extension LOLspeak) are born of the online gaming/chat board comunity of the 90s and early 2000s (and probably from the gaming community that existed before the internet). For example I'm in ur base, killing ur d00z, which lead to the I'm in your X, Ying your Z snowclone, as well as words like woot, teh and pwn.

Another favourite of gamers is FTW - "for the win". Here win is extended beyond gaming victories, to any other triumph in life, so if I'd just got really good tickets for a show, it would be appropriate to declare Lauren for the win! It's a phrase that has been used as the title of a book, and a board game, as well as in countless internet forums.

On Friday night, before PAX, I was chatting with some friends who said they know people who used FTW to mean "fuck the world". The always disreputable Urban Dictionary points to this usage. With roughly 2.38 million Google hits for "fuck the world" versus 565 million for "for the win" (and many of those attributable to several songs with that title) it looks like it's a minority usage, and I don't imagine it would gain traction in many internet communities. Is this a usage you've heard of before? It was certainly new to me on Friday night.