In my thesis I am going to examine the effects which are influencing the English language due to the incredibly fast and immense spread of the Internet, and the consequent changes which are already visible and sometimes fossilized. After summarizing some background information, I am going to analyze some affected areas - which are going to be the main topics in the thesis - such as the vocabulary with morphological changes and orthographical features, the appearance of phonology in writing, the disappearance of boundaries between writing and talking, illustrated by the real-life examples of chatroom conversations and electronic mail, the sociolinguistic consequences of the new ways of communication, and the changes in communication with the evaluation of electronic mail as a new separate genre of it. In the end, I am going to provide some examples for the use of the Internet as a basis for finding linguistic rules and patterns, too.