CON TEXT

This week Con Textlooks at Nerdic

You mean Nordic, surely?
No, I mean Nerdic - the fastest-growing language in the world.

What, faster than Esperanto?
Nerdic is the techie Esperanto, a universal language that anybody can understand, whether they're wired into the epicentre of internet activity or simply idling in the quietest backwater of the blogosphere. Most of us talk Nerdic without even realising it. If you regularly bang on about twittering on Facebook and using your android to send mashups via the HSDPA, then you probably speak fluent Nerdic.

Well, obviously I don't speak it - I didn't understand a word of that.
Then you'd better enrol in Nerdic school, my friend, because the growth of geek-speak is outpacing the languages of the world.

It's reckoned that 100 new Nerdic words have been added to the vocabulary in the past year, three times the number of new English words added to the Oxford English Dictionary. "Technology has revolutionised the way we speak," says Stuart Miles, editor of gadget website Pocket-Lint. "With so many words and phrases being created all the time, it's created a whole new way of communicating. Everyone knows what it means to Google something, and technology is moving at such a rapid pace that there are more and more new words coming into the English language. If you're really into technology, it is possible to have an entire conversation in Nerdic."

But come on, it's not really a proper language, is it?
The people at Pixmania.com, an electronics website, reckon Nerdic fits all the criteria, and have applied to the Britain's Foreign and Commonwealth Office to have it recognised as an official language. They say all that the basic elements for a proper language - words, phrases and pronunciation - are present and correct in Nerdic. If 2,000 Cornish speakers can get official recognition, they reason, why not the millions of Nerdic speakers?

So how do I learn to speak Nerdic?
You just have to pepper your conversation with the latest techie buzz-words, and Pixmania has provided a top 10 list, just to help you along this new learning curve. Words include wimax (monster wi-fi), mash-up (combining elements from different websites), android (Google software for phones), HSDPA (3G to you and me), UGC (user-generated content), and Rick-rolling (diverting someone to a video of Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up). Start memorising now, because by the end of this year the number of new Nerdic words will have doubled.

Aagh! We're going to drown in geek-speak.
Don't worry - for every new word thrown up by technology, there's an obsolete word to be cast into the recycle bin of terminology. Thanks to technology's rapid upgrade rate, many once-trendy words have become linguistic dodos. Who uses such outdated techie terms as floppy discs, kilobytes, dial-up or VHS anymore? Er . . .

Try at work:
The new guy speaks excellent English - I give him six months.

Try at home:
Quick, darling, little Tristan has said his first word: Google!