I’ve been watching language get turned into money. All languages, in fact, and all languages in concert with one another. It might be time to start thinking about how human language itself is becoming globalized — led, as usual, by the Internet.

Money is leading us toward one big global patois, which will be mutually semi-intelligible. Sort of like business English is today — great for Chinese factory orders, bad for pillow talk. It will exist next to our normal language, except that we may not even speak it, only type and read it on the Internet. Many pidgin langugages have grown up around commerce; we may be seeing the birth of a new one.

So what’s the vocabulary? Which words/phrases will become well-known across languages, and which will remain only in the local language? Keywords bids can tell us a lot.

We know that advertisers value some words more than others. They value the cross-section of two values: how popular a word is, and how easy it is to convert it into revenue.

So “the” is the most popular word, but isn’t much valued ($0.10), while “mesotheliomia” is very rare, but is highly valued ($12.01).

Here are some others values courtesy of the Yahoo view bid tool):

Within a category of similar words the same is true:

This snapshot shows how website publishers and advertisers, as they follow the money, are going to be drawn to some words more than others, which suggests that these words might become more widely used. (It might also show how our values are badly askew, but that’s a different blog.)

BUT, BUT — what about the objection that this just shows the commercial use of a word, which surely is not a good wider definition of language?

Well, yes and no. This is the dirty underbelly of customer power.

Many - have - said (and I believe) that the new Web has given power to the user/customer/reader, because they initiate the involvement with a web site by using search to find what they want.

Thus a business that wants to sell its goods or services needs to respond to the vocabulary of the user or risk getting no visitors. Which words ordinary people (users/readers/customers) choose to search with, therefore, will control which words are monetized for commerce. As a result the entire language, as it is used on the web, will become more or less commercialized. Words and phrases are now the subject of an efficient market which places a price on their use.

A corollary is how one language is valued over another. Here are some English words compared to their counterparts in German (German is the only other language I can find for which Yahoo! is making bid information available).

There are some words that are more valuable in German (e.g., “Bundesliga”, the name of the German football league), but words of general application are simply more valuable in English than in German (and, I’d wager, than in other languages). I contend that this is because English words are more convertible into money than German words are. The reasons for English dominance are manifold, and well-rehearsed by many commentators, but the consequence is that the language itself is more valuable. With keywords for search, and domain names, people are starting to profit from that value.

Domain names are another face on this. They may be more valuable than the top sponsored spot on a search engine results page, simply because you own a domain name uniquely, forever, without competition, whereas a top spot in Google is only as good as the last high bid you placed, only as good as Google is. On the other hand, the domain name market is far less efficient and not as good for comparing the values of words and phrases.

Thanks to search and domain names, realms where language is stripped of context and reduced to little “meaning units”, words and phrases on the Internet will start to function a bit like money — a powerful invisible scrip, owned by some, understood by a few, managed by many, influencing all.

Posted by Antony in: Domains, Media + Marketing, Search