final exam rhetoric in cyberspace

Studying applied linguistics, one of my posts definitely had to be on the issue of revolution of language. I was monitoring Elif’s posts on this topic and they brought up some good points. I found her post 1 and 2 taken from the discourse analysis perspective (especially in terms of Brooke's Remediation of Style), so I thought it would be beneficiary to shed some different light on this topic from the linguistic perspective.

From the beginning I was not happy about the term “revolution of language,” but I could not figure out why. I think that the linguistic theory of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis answered my question (although it took me a while!). Most of the linguists now agree with an idea that language reflects the reality (rather than that it determines it). From this standpoint, if we wanted to talk about revolution of language, we would first have to agree that there was a revolution of reality. So far changes in language were brought by changes of reality, mainly due to the ongoing evolution (especially in technology). For example, new words emerge in language because of new inventions, such as automobile, computer, or blog. However, I don’t view the invention of e.g. blogs as a revolution, rather it is a new invention which brings just some changes to the reality. This makes me think that instead of talking about revolution, we may talk about “Revolution” but without the “R” consonant.