Technolingualism refers to the mutually influential relationship between language and technology. James Pfrehm writes accessibly on how new technologies create new linguistic repertoires and language ideologies, as well as how linguistic structure shapes the development of language technologies. Selections from this timely work would be appropriate for an introductory course in science, technology, and society studies; literacy and education; and of course, linguistics. Introductory linguistics courses tend to shy away from the system-external aspects of language, such as writing and computer-mediated communication, even as those are frequently the aspects that most animate protolinguists and laypeople. For his part, this is a tendency Pfrehm finds wrongheaded, as ‘[w]e are all technolinguals’ (250).
Pfrehm groups eight major technologies into five stages. The first, textualisation (chapter 1), begins with a reimagined Socratic dialogue, in which writing is argued to herald ‘the end of man's intellect’ (2). Two motifs are established here. First, new language technologies are often the target of enduring anxieties about culturolinguistic degeneration. Second, languages with nonalphabetic scripts encounter certain difficulties at the language-technology interface, as a result of their larger graphemic inventories, amongst other factors, creating a so-called ‘alphabet effect’. Both motifs are ceaselessly reprised in four later stages: mechanisation (the printing press and typewriter, chapter 2), abstraction (telephony and telegraphy, chapter 3), digitisation (the computer, chapter 4), and mobilisation (mobile telephony, chapter 5). On net, language technologies dissociate spoken language from its prototypical existence as an acoustic signal to be sent and received in a dyadic interaction, turning it into texts, handwritten, typed, or printed; pulses or fluctuations of electric current; or binary code. The end result is a progressive dislocation of language from user, attending a host of social transformations, to include the emergence of new journalistic, literary, and epistolary styles, intellectual property law, lexicography and orthographic prescriptivism, and standards of telephonic and digital etiquette.
The final stage, regeneration (chapter 6), breaks away from this mould of linguistic deterritorialisation through technology, by presenting the ways in which language technologies allow deaf/Deaf people to access spoken language. Although Pfrehm discusses at length the objections held by some Deaf activists against cochlear implantation (called elsewhere ‘technological stigmata’), his use of regeneration bespeaks an underlying, if unintentional, audionormativity.
This book is at its best when it explains in detail the operation and functioning of specific language technologies, and when it synthesises the best of what historians, literary scholars, and linguists have to say about the broader impacts of technolingualism. It does less well when it discusses actual linguistic forms. For instance, ‘5’ in French is given as cinque (instead of cinq, p. 7), and Japanese wa and ga are misidentified as subject and object markers (they are, respectively, topic and subject markers, p. 129). The sequence -ki in suki ‘like’ is glossed as a ‘first-person verb conjugation’, even as Japanese lacks canonical person inflexion (129). Errata like these abound, and may prove distracting to the specialist reader.
