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Much of the history of language and communication is also the history of technology. Over the centuries, the invention of new technologies has massively changed how we communicate with each other and how we use language. The first major invention in this history was writing in around 3400 BCE. This allowed people to communicate across distances – a written message could be transported across a country – and across time – I can still read the thoughts of Aristotle, despite having been born over 2,350 years after him. 

Today, technological change happens at a dizzying pace. In the case of communication, it is digital technology especially that is having the greatest impact on how we use language and how we interact with each other.

When I first joined the Open University around twenty years ago, we were already teaching about digital communication. The main focus back then was on email. The textbook we used, written at the end of the 1990s, had a section explaining what exactly email was, just in case any readers weren’t familiar with the concept. 

Over the subsequent twenty years, sociolinguistics – the discipline that examines how language is used in society – has explored the various ways in which technology has changed both the form, shape and use of language. Back in the noughties, there was a fascination with the new words and expressions being coined to describe the altered world we found ourselves living in. Blogs and microblogging were seen as leading the revolution in citizen journalism. Online users were described as netizens, subject to the emerging rules of netiquette. There was debate about whether the internet had given rise to a distinct form of language, netspeak. Researchers began investigating new online practices and the vocabulary that grew up around them: the social implications of unfriending someone, for example, as well as the phenomenon of online trolling, and the precise meaning of Facebook’s enigmatic poke feature.

Some of these terms have endured, others are all but obsolete. A few years later, the focus had moved to the question of whether language as we knew it was going to be replaced entirely. This was in the wake of the global popularity of emojis, an invention which seemed perfectly suited to social media, mobile communication and the smartphone. Along with a fascination about how people used emojis to communicate and whether they could be considered a language in their own right, there was, in certain quarters, a moral panic about what the rise of a picture-based language indicated about standards of literacy in the modern world.

Fast-forward another few years and it is artificial intelligence which is having the most profound impact on what we do with language. Now, the detailed business of communication is something we can seemingly outsource almost entirely to machines, who appear able to formulate phrases, sentences and discourse with an ease and fluidity beyond the average human. This has prompted all types of philosophical questions, from whether artificial intelligence can in any sense be said to ‘understand’ the language it produces, to whether the existence of machines which talk, write and reason mean that human beings are on the road to redundancy.

A couple of years ago I wrote a book called The Future of Language. One of the issues it looked at was how people in the past had imagined what they thought the future of language would be. Most of the predictions were for how technology could enhance our powers of communication and, through better communication, bring about a better world. 

There are two stories that tend to get told about the impact of communications technology on the world over the past few years: one positive, one negative. The positive story is that digital technology has made communication faster, easier and more accessible, giving more people the means to share ideas and participate in public life. The negative story is that these very same technologies have enabled misinformation, manipulation and polarisation to spread on an unprecedented scale around society, severely undermining the ambitions that better communication was supposed to bring. 

The study of sociolinguistics, and of how people use language, can help us understand why the inventions of the past twenty years have had such a diverse and conflicting impact on society. And they can also help us think about what we can learn from this recent history as we debate the role we want communications technologies to play in the coming years and decades.