Texting is Killing Language

Texting is killing language

Texting is a scourge, texting spells the decline and fall of any kind of serious literacy, texting is not writing at all.  Basically, if we think about language, language has existed for perhaps 150,000 years, at least 80,000 years, and what it arose as is speech. People talked, that what we're probably genetically specified for that's how we use language most. Writing is something that came along much later, writing comes along as a kind of artifice.writing has certain advantages. When we write, because it's a conscious process, because we can look backward, we can do things with language that are much less likely if you're just talking.

 Linguists have actually shown that when we're speaking casually in an unmonitored way, we tend to speak in word packets of maybe seven to 10 words. We’ll notice this if we ever have occasion to record yourself or a group of people talking. That's what speech is like, Speech is much looser. It's much more telegraphic, it's much less reflective, very different from writing. So, we naturally tend to think, because we see language written so often, that's what language is, but actually, language is spoken, they are two things.

 Texting is very loose in its structure. No one thinks about capital letters or punctuation when one text despite the fact that it involves the brute mechanics of something that we call writing, is fingered speech. That's what texting is. Now we can write the way we talk and it's a very interesting thing. In this new kind of language, there is new structure coming up. for example, there is in texting a convention, which is LOL. Now LOL, we generally think of as meaning "laughing out loud." and of course, theoretically, it does and if we look at older texts, then people used it to actually indicate laughing out loud. But if you text now, or if you are someone who is aware of the substrate of texting the way it's become, you'll notice that LOL does not mean laughing out loud anymore. It's evolved into something that is many subtitles. LOL is being used in a very particular way.

It's a marker of empathy. It's a marker of accommodation. We linguists call things like that pragmatic particles. Any spoken language that's used by real people has them. If we happen to speak Japanese, think about that little word "ne" that we use at the end of a lot of sentences. If you listen to the way black youth today speak, think about the use of the word "yo" Whole dissertations could be written about it and probably are being written about it.

A pragmatic particle, that's what LOL has gradually become. It's a way of using the language between actual people. Another example is "slash." Now, we can use the slash in the way that we're used to, along with the lines of, "We're going to have a party-slash-networking session." That's kind of like what we're at. Slash is used in a very different way in texting among young people in this time it's used to change the scene.

What we're really trying to do is change the topic, we can't do that while we're texting and so ways are developing of doing it within this medium. All spoken languages have what a linguist calls a new information marker or two, three. Texting has developed one from this slash. So, we have a whole battery of new constructions that are developing, and yet it's easy to think, well, something is still wrong. There's a lack of structure of some sort. This is the time when we all assume that everything somehow in terms of writing was perfect because the people on "Downton Abbey" are articulate, the way the speaker’s thinking of texting these time is that what we're seeing is a whole new way of writing that young people are developing, Texting actually is evidence of a balancing act that young people are using today, not consciously, of course, but it's an expansion of their linguistic repertoire, it's very simple.

In the last speech, Jhon McWhorter said the audience to show him a sheaf of texts written by 16-year-old girls, because he would want to know where this language had developed since our times and ideally, he would then send them back to us and him now so we could examine this linguistic miracle happening right under our noses.