Is texting a new "slanguage"? . Could it be a good way to improve spelling and phonetics?. Is it destroying our written Language?. 

 

Opinions are divided.  For some teachers, point-to-point short message and Whatsapp  have contributed to developing a kind of “slanguage” we call “texting,” which is currently destroying actual written language. Most of them “h8” this new variety of languaje, but many other teachers “luv” it, since it may be –they say- a good way to improve spelling and phonetics.

All of the scholars, linguists, authors, and lecturers will agree with the answer to the main question:

 

      Is texting actually a new language phenomenon?.

 

Find the answer below:

 

   "Almst evr wrd cn b abbrvtd nd txtd, nd so has bn 4 ags".

 

In fact almost every word of English can be abbreviated; words can be combined, curtailed, acronymed, shortened, initialized, rebused; letters can be removed, sounds can be misplaced...and it has been so for centuries now.

 

Texting itself is not at all a novel trend

 

The several distinctive features combined in the texts on a computer or a cell phone screen give us the impression of novelty, but none of them is, in fact, linguistically novel.

 

Many of them can already be  found in informal writing and in shorthand papers, dating back more than a hundred years.

 

The abbreviation is, in fact, an old phenomenon in English. Its origins can be traced back to the very moment it  began to be coded and written down. Abbreviation consists mainly on leaving letters representing vowel sounds out of the wrd (for word) or on cutting off its final syl (for sylabus). This phenomenon has produced many sequences which have become actual words, such as "exam", "bus" and "fridge", and many others like "msg", "xlnt", "wrd", "gd", "almst", "gn", "mth"... , most of which can be found in Partridge’s Dictionary of Abbreviations (1942).

 

Some of the most celebrated writers of the early 1700’s complained in their works about the “miserable curtailing” of words. "Pos" (for positive),"neg" (for the opposite) and "inco" (for incognito) were "trending words" in that period.

 

 Yesterday night I texted back a friend of mine: 

                      "2 l8 4 me 2 c u, cub"

 

The sequence above is an example of Rebuse: we call “rebuse” to  the use of single letters, numerals, and symbols to represent words or parts of words: 4 for for, 2 for to, u for you,  c for see and l8 for late.

 

Rebuses go back centuries. The sequence “c u” for see you has been used for ages now (thought not on a cell phone screen).

 

Every student of English Language has faced both the existence of  the”h8table”so called  Acronyms and the question: What do NATO/AAA/UPAC ..... stand for?

 

The use of Acronyms can be traced back to the birth of the English Language.

 

There are many well-known traditional Acronyms like: ONU, FBI, NATO...and many others already turned into actual words, such as scuba or  radar.

 

Acronyms of new origins are: JPEG, HTML, URL ( which stand for Joint Photographic Experts Group, Hyper Text Markup language and Universal Resource Locator).

 

The use of initial letters for the whole words, so as to create Acronyms or whole words,  is not at all new either. We find the sequence IOU for “I owe you” in official documents of the early 1600’s. This formation has been since then applied to an official document similar to the Spanish “pagaré”

 

During and after the 2ndWW (Second World War) the loving  kiss our grandparents used to seal their love letters with, created the sweet  Acronym: "Swalk" ("sealed with a loving kiss). 

 

Novelties like W3 (for www.), Q8 (for Kuwait) K9 (for drug investigation police force) are combinations of  initialism, rebuse and Acronymy.

 

Do you dare to practice on your own texting!!. It's worth a try!!