So change. Much English. Very technology.
No, I don’t have horrible grammar. It’s the DOGE meme.
Can you guess how many texts one person exchanges in a day?
65 text messages every two days.
Ten years ago, this was the number of text messages shared every month.
During the past decade there has been a huge change in how we communicate. Eyebrows were never used to be ‘on fleek’ and we never used to looked ‘fly’.
We are in the midst of the largest communication shift in human history. Digital technology has influenced the way we process and speak the English language. A commonly acknowledged fact is that with the rise in texting, there is a fall in grammar and punctuation. Thanks to technology, communicating online, however that may be, is so informal that it is guiding English to its grave #RIP. It’s hard blame the #haters when this sentence,
Thank you for having me over! I really loved the gift.
turns into this.
Thx 4 having me over!!!! Omg i SO ❤ da gift! :-)
Texting, to a large extent, has contributed to the erosion of literacy in our generation, and this might lead to large grammar and literacy barriers between generations.
But, there is another way to look at it. Instead of becoming unintelligent, we may have gained a new cognitive ability. “What texting is, despite the fact that it involves the brute mechanics of something that we call writing, is fingered speech,” John McWhorter, author and associate professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, said in a 2013 TED Talk. Texting, he argues, is ushering in new writing forms and rules, meaning that not only is it not a bad thing for grammar, it actually means we have a generation of people who are bilingual in a new way — able to seamlessly switch between speech, writing, and an entirely new mode of communication that has its own linguistic rules.
In 2009, Beverly Plester and Clare Wood, taking interest in the question of the influence of texting on literacy, focused on the use of text messaging by preteen British children. In this study, the researchers paid specific attention to the abbreviations and characteristic language used within text messages, also known as ‘textese’ and ‘textisms.’ Their results did not conclusively support the negative reports surrounding cell phone use and texting. In fact, they discovered that textese and textisms assisted the development of literary skills.
Grammar is not the only thing that’s evolving, it’s words too. ‘To Google’ has become a universally understood verb and ‘I don’t know’ has been chopped to ‘idk’.
Such shifts in grammar and wording are always happening. It’s natural for words to drift into one another over time. They seem to be shifting faster than ever thanks to technology. And just like how every country has a different language, the internet is made up of different countries, each with their own language. Reddit has a particular style, as does Twitter and Instagram.
However we decide to continue the evolution of the texting language, balancing the old and the new, we must be mindful to never end our essay on Shakespeare with ‘xoxo’.
