ABSTRACT
Applied linguistics is the application of linguistic theories, models, methods, concepts, and research findings to the elucidation and solution of problems in fields where language plays a central role. The Internet is such a field, as it is totally dependent on language, whether written or spoken. Even in cases of websites which on screen seem to consist of no more than images, language is present in the underlying content specification of the pages (part of the metadata); and until such time as advanced visual pattern-recognition techniques are developed, it is not possible for such pages to be found and indexed without linguistic support. Problems of Internet management are therefore likely to need investigation using the same kind of perspective that has proved to be successful in such other domains of applied linguistics as foreign language teaching, forensic science, and speech pathology.
