This lecture will aim at presenting what from my point of view can be the most outstanding interfaces between the standard principles of Historical Linguistics (inner reconstruction, comparative approaches, external factor, selection of “most adequate” forms…) and the way in which we have modulated methodological approaches to study the language of the internet and other computing media. Networks language shows modes of speech that relay on traditional, well-established forms together with highly innovative and volatile developments, and in this sense the last two decades are a perfect lab to study language evolution and language change: when computers started appearing on people’s desks back in the early 1980’s their “language” was reduced to a small contingent population. Twenty years later net users can be counted as billions.
However, it is not just the number of people using the net what counts in this story: it is also the kind and the typology of the language they are using.
When the Indoeuropean peoples started their migrations some 7,000 years ago it took them some centuries to reach a considerable diversity of language types. The language(s) of the net are written, well, most of it(them)… but the pace of change and adaptability can very well summarize in twenty years most of the phenomena that we have observed in the previous fifty centuries. The language(s) of the net can help us to be the better understanding of the principles governing language change and language evolution.

Plenay speakers' biodata.

In 1492, a German abbot named Trithemius cautioned his monks not to be seduced by the printing technology introduced in the West fifty years earlier by Johannes Gutenburg. Yet within three centuries, much of Europe had been transformed from an oral culture into one that was fundamentally grounded in the printed word.
Print culture flowered for more than 200 years. However, thanks to impressive technological innovations and equally fundamental social changes, the future of written culture as we have known it is increasingly in question. This address identifies the specific parameters that historically came to define written culture and considers the viability of these parameters in the new millennium.

Plenay speakers' biodata.

One of the aims of the so called cyberpragmatics is to determine the contextualising processes undertaken by Internet users when producing and interpreting messages. Far away from an stagnant context vision according to which communicative exchanges follow one another in a predetermined time-space location, the idea that nowadays people have about the context is much more dynamic and has an inferential nature which plays its role departing from text decodification with possible mental links to relevant information sources in order to correctly select the appropriate interpretations. 
It has been demonstrated the usefulness of this dynamic vision in communicative settings such as the chat or the electronic mail. In this paper we will turn into the contextualizing operations of socio-pragmatic nature intended for the formation and stabilization of the feeling of virtual community. The analysis will show that, again, dynamic contextualization starting from textual decodification of messages sent to different communicative settings of Internet contributes to the formation of more or less stable cognitive schemata which refer to the necessary co-ownership sensation that is the ground for the whole community formation and maintenance.

Plenay speakers' biodata.

Like every other site, commercial web sites (i.e. portals designed to carry out business transactions on the web or e-commerce) do not  only have to catch the attention of the web surfer, who in the end can also become a potential customer, they are also engaged in the crucial task of guiding the reader through the complex maze of semiotic systems which is a web page. Successful sites are those which succeed at giving the reader enough information, not more nor less, to be able to find the relevant information they are seeking.
Although we assume that this navigation aid is not exclusively verbal, the aim this talk is to analyse the linguistic means by which this navigation is assisted, to explore the ways in which the communication between commercial businesses and their potential clients is achieved by focusing not on the actual content of the site (product, information, etc.) but on the verbal devices the designers of the portal use to guide their readers. In short, we will deal with, what extending their meaning from other contexts, could be named digital metatext or metadiscourse.
As is well known, metatext refers to the words or expressions used in a text to guide the reader in the understanding of its actual content. It includes those elements of discourse “which help to organise prose as a coherent text and covey a writer’s personality, credibility, reader sensibility and relationship to the message” (Hyland, 2000:109) and has been applied to a wide variety of areas and topics which ranges from conversation, school texts and science popularisations to academic writing (Hyland, 2000).
However, the concept of metatext has not been applied to the best of our knowledge, to digital discourse in general and to the language used on the web in particular. No one has explored how metatext is used in digital documents and it is our belief that this extension could result in a better understanding of how this type of discourse works.
Although no definitive conclusions can be reached at this early stage, a number of hypotheses are raised and considered. Here we find some of them:
1. Deeper web sites, i.e. those with a greater number of pages, require a greater amount of metatext to be succesful.
2. Top level pages will include a greater number of metatext devices since their function tends to be more navigational than informational.
3. The wider the audience of a commercial web site (for example the more international it is) the more like the presence of metatext since readers will usually need more guidance.
Finally, special attention will be devoted to what we think a type of metatextual device which is restricted to digital discourse, hypertextual links or nodes. In so far as they help readers to navigate through digital documents, links play an outstanding role in commercial web sites and can be classified according to the metatextual function they carry out.