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).