texting and literacy
From Media on the Move: “Less tangible, but equally pervasive in the risk discourses, is the alleged danger text-messaging poses to the print literacy of the young ‘thumb tribes’. With its 160 characters, it invites unorthodox forms of spelling that are clearly at odds with the proficiencies taught at school and hence judged deficient by educational standards.”
I first noticed this when I was in China a few years ago. I would hear Chinese students or co-workers asking how to write such-and-such a character. In China texting is the norm for this next generation, and unfortunately many people will substitute equivalent characters for the correct character. I.E. Characters that phonetically sound similar, but are easier to recognize (however with a completely different meaning.)
So the effects of this are two fold, the ability to write Chinese is becoming more difficult for these texters, and the ability to write grammatically correct may become more difficult. It isn’t just the introduction of textual slang, but it is a dumbing down in literacy and writing.
Texting has become such a convient way for people to communicate, it is causing non-texters (like myself) to fall behind such current trends. I almost never send any text messages, and if I do it is once in a blue moon. Yet the text messages I recieve, it feels like I have to be a spy to read these messages. The current youth have canabalized traditional english grammar and turned it into a jargon of indecyperable words. How long until the dictionary starts to acknowlege these nonsensical phrases in it’s pages?
Comment by dpena — February 26, 2008 @ 6:37 am
Text messaging is just another language (or dialect). From a Linguistics view point, the texting dialect could never be considered a destruction of english grammar (because they believe grammar describes the way language is used rather than tells people how to use language). I must therefore argue that texting is not a bad thing, nor even just necessarily unfavorable.
Yes, we are seeing a radical shift in the way that language is used, but languages change all the time. Linguistic studies have shown that languages naturally evolve into simpler states, trading harder sound out in favor of sounds that are easier to produce. The “gh” in words like “night” and “through” once sounded like that throaty “h” in “Hanukah” that causes it to sometimes be written “Chanukah;” thus “night” sounded closer to the German “nicht.” This is why the “gh” in English produces so many different pronounciations.
Like text-messaging, the spoken language has always been “at odds with the proficiencies taught at school.” The Roman Empire, for instance spoke in their local vernaculars but always wrote in latin. The church even read the bible in latin to people who didn’t understand any of it. Technically, proper grammar doesn’t even like contractions, and the end of sentences is not where prepositions are supposed to be (but try telling people they can’t go to a pool and jump in). A peer editor wrote on one of my recent papers the question “why do he use sarcasm,” which is “grammatically incorrect” in school but, correct–and completely understood–in our spoken vernacular.
While I haven’t experienced China, it has been my understanding that it is just a difficult language to learn to write, because they have thousands of character to memorize while we just have 26 (36 if you count numbers, more if you count punctuation). I have experienced America, and our education of grammar is substantially less than what it once was. Even concepts like “noun” and “verb” don’t get taught early enough; I actually had to teach myself these things and dictionaries don’t help. I imagine that the simplification of Chinese characters would be partly roughly equivalent to reducing one’s vocabulary/lexicon, but the fact that we can’t read texting words says that they are actually new words independant of the English words they translate to, which in turn means that people of this generation still have a moderately robust vocabulary which simply consist of words not in ours.
I suspect that the current phenomenon of texting may just be the formation of a new language. Perhaps it is the beginnings of a first ever World Language. But sure is developing fast. I’m afraid to say it but, our difficulty with adapting to it may just mean we’ve become old-timers complaining about today’s youth: “where’s the culture,” “where’s the decency,” “the future is going to hell.” Just be glad that people don’t speak in texting dialect (yet).
Comment by aBuerer — February 27, 2008 @ 5:57 pm