Henning Lobin: “It is the question of whether something new will be created, whether new possibilities of expression will arise or whether it will possibly lead to impoverishment.”
Image: dpa
Not only when typing on smartphones are we used to machines suggesting and correcting what we write: The linguist Henning Lobin on developments and sensitivities.
From auto-correction to the automatic translation of texts: our writing and our handling of typefaces is increasingly being supported by machines. Does this also change the language?
With machine systems, non-human language skills are introduced into communication. It is programmed, partly machine-learned, and described by rules that do not necessarily correspond to those that humans learned when they learned the language. That alone will lead to a slight change in language in certain areas.
What are these rules?
We humans always adapt our ways of expression to the communicative situation in which we find ourselves. For example, we adapt when we talk to children, or we take into account the assumed level of education of the interlocutor. The choice of words is geared to this, for example the use of foreign words, or we use simpler sentence constructions. None of this happens in a technological communication. Language assistants, for example, have a very specific linguistic inventory. If children are intensively confronted with such a system in the active phase of language acquisition, this can result in an impulse for language development.
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