In previous centuries, the convergence of cultures and trade led to the emergence of pidgin – a streamlined system of communication that has simple grammatical structure, says Michael Ullman, director of research at Georgetown University's Brain and Language Lab. When the next generation of pidgin speakers begins to add vocabulary and grammar, it becomes a distinct Creole language. "You get different endings, it's more complex and systematised. Something like that could be happening to English on the web," he says.

Robert Lane Greene disagrees:

Many non-natives write online in English. Some of them have distinctive varieties of English, but none are creolising the main body of English. … Singaporeans use (usually quite good) standard English with non-Singaporeans. Many other non-natives are simply writing English full of the typical mistakes of a non-fluent speaker. But there are no children learning their first language from this broken English and regularising the mistakes into a new creole. The reason is obvious: children do not learn their first language from the internet.