Language, Ur grammarz, and Rites of Passage.

I was browsing the internets and came across this article on msnbc: http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2009/02/26/1810643.aspx
It's called The Race to Save Our Languages, and it's basically about just that: saving languages that are close to extinction. If anyone else has taken Anthro 2D you know what i'm talking about, but if not this article explains it pretty good. Anyway, the article also says:

"[Harrison] also has an interest in keeping linguistic diversity as vibrant as possible, in part by devising ways to keep languages alive online. "When languages are shut out of technologies, when they have no presence on the Internet, when they can't be typed out, that lowers their prestige. ... We try to help languages cross the digital divide," Harrison said."

I found this pretty interesting because i never would've expected to find these language issues here but again, all these new spaces are being formed through technology and people are bringing culture into them, and in turn cultures are formed because of/affected by the technology. In this case, just the fact that the culture (in the form of language) is absent from the internet affects it's very existence in the 'real world'.
You're no one if you're not on the internet these days.

Which kind of brings me to something else: I was looking up a friend's email address when i noticed how it contained a number: 2005. Her highschool graduation . So i got to thinking how a lot of people have numbers engraved in their email addresses, screen names, etc. but at least in our generation a lot of them seem to be dates for things such as highschool graduation, which is a significant milestone for a lot of people. However, it also seems that a lot of the people i know use that date because they were in high school at the time that they made their email addresses. So now i'm wondering if maybe making your first email address has itself become a rite of passage for young people. Or not just an email address, but maybe your first screen name, or MySpace account, or whatever it was that your friends made you join so you could talk to them afterschool, or so that you could write about how bored you were in IB/AP Econ while you were sitting in IB/AP Econ (all of which require an email address actually).

Just as it was pretty significant when other kids invited you to play with them in kindergarten for the first time or when you first got a driving permit, joining your peers and making yourself present to society online has become another rite of passage for kids, who are growing up with the technology now widely available. You even get to commemorate it with something clever like sk8ter69 or liltiggergurl2006.

The only thing i don't know is to what extent this works as kids are going online as young as 5 years old now. They are usually monitored by their parents, and i don't think they are even at a stage in development where they go online to socialize, but if a child is accustomed to having an email at a young age, would it render the rite of passage null?

Lastly, i don't know if this happens in other languages or if it's even possible, but i noticed not long ago (maybe two years back), that people from Latin American countries started to write Spanish with purposely bad grammar and misspellings. Kind of like in English we subtitute plural s with z's. As in "i can has cheesburgerz?" In Spanish they tend to switch Qs with Ks. As in "Por K?" (Por Que?). It threw me off a little because even though i speak Spanish i've never really frequented any places online where people socialize in Spanish, so when i saw this it was like whoa. I think if i were to try to talk to them online they'd find out in a second that i don't know anything about actually living in Latin America even though i can speak the language and could pass as one of them in the 'physical world' (...i am seriously tripping out here thinkig about that). It'd be interesting to find out if this also isn't a new thing, like the Victorian Internet stuff, or if it's just a globalization thing.