Language and Social Relations- Written Task Language and Literature SL IB. Critics in the last few years have come up strongly against electronic communication through texting on the grounds that it will not only cause the emergence of new vocabularies but will also make the existing ones to disappear. They further argue that these changes are not for the better because they will impact on language learning and acquisition adversely. However, inasmuch as they have a right to make such accusations, should everyone be literate in order to text from their phone? Should we use the same vocabularies forever? For the following reasons, the answer to the questions is NO!
Firstly, the world has over 4.6 billion people who own at least a phone. That means nearly a half of the world’s population uses a phone to text, and it has become a major part of their everyday lives. Therefore, texting is regarded as a way of simplifying communication rather than a way to improve one’s literacy levels. Besides, research shows that most text messages involve relatives, friends, and workmates – which is an informal setting that does not necessarily need adherence to academic standards. For these reasons, it would be unreasonable to say texting kills the English language because the context and rationale of doing so are outside the academic scope.
Secondly, communication using text messages is almost spontaneous, especially because of the mobile phones. Therefore, it takes less time to encode a message – thanks to word prediction software – and for the recipient to receive it. With these facts in mind, I like to think of texting as the written form of the way we speak and thus when we text, we tend not to pay attention to capital letters, misspelt words, and punctuation. Consequently, this could be one of the reasons why some scholars instigate phone texting is killing the English language, but their argument is invalid because texting is synonymous with verbal speaking.
It can also be argued that the point of texting is to be quick and efficient, which has the same purpose of communicating verbally. So when texts are misspelt, more often than not, we can still understand what the sender meant. With this in mind, you don't have to feel guilty of sending texts full of grammatical and misspelt words because the recipient will not care and/or judge you. Take punctuation in the English language for example, most sentences end with a full stop. However, putting a full stop at the end of a message while texting can give a sense of harshness or the vibe "I'm very busy right now, can we stop texting". It can also show the recipient that you do not want a reply and that the text conversation is over. Therefore, if scholars want to protect the English language from the “perceived-adverse” wave of phone texting, then they will need to change the perception of every phone users which is almost an exercise in futility.
Additionally, there seems to be a misconception between killing and the language evolving among those who oppose phone texting. John McWhorter (2013) wrote the article “Is Texting Killing the English Language” – available here, and his opinion is that a language cannot be killed, but can evolve and become more complex. In this regard, it is valid to say that language is something dynamic and the younger generations will always to be different in how they communicate. So, they always create their own coding system and meaning behind different words or numbers to exclude other people from their conversation, and texting though the phone is one way of doing that. To give a modern example, the use of emojis is becoming more phenomenal among the young people, whereas the adults tend to keep their texts quite lengthy and well punctuated. Such generational differences mean that people cannot be controlled to text is a certain way in their informal communications.
Last but not least, critics from teachers and parents’ quarters have been basing their argument on the use of spell check technology by the students to claim that texting will eventually kill the English language. They argue such phone technologies help us to automatically fix mistakes when typing a message and even expand our abbreviation knowledgebase. Although it may be true that they promote proofreading laziness among learners, which I partly agree with, we should not forget that texting is popular among phone uses because it does not have to follow any rules. Besides, not all phone users are scholars and as such, generalizing the problem to some extent can be considered as infringement on the right of free speech. Besides, people want to spend their precious time being productive as opposed to coming up with lengthy messages that observe all the grammar rules.
The Bottom Line
To wrap things up, I doubt that the emergence of a new language in texting will kill the English language. Even when texts are misspelt, more often than not, we can still understand what the sender meant. Therefore, people should understand that language is not a stagnant way of communicating and has been changing and evolving for centuries. You can’t expect it to stay the same when the way we interact and communicate with each other changes constantly. We have to learn how to adapt to new vocabulary, abbreviations, and means of proofreading written texts and face the associated challenges head on.
With that in mind, you do not have to feel guilty of sending texts full of grammatical and misspelt words because the recipient will not care and/or judge you as long as the communication is held in an informal context.
Blog Comments
Hi Tim,
My daughter has recently purchased a phone and she texts quite a lot with her friends which I have no problem with. The only issue is that she sometimes uses text-language when writing essay or stories. What do you think I should do?
Thanks!
Hi Gracie,
One way to tackle this scenario is to talk to your daughter about it and show her a clear difference between the two types of writing. Try and oversee her English tasks or homework and look for the errors. This scenario is very common so don't take it out on her :))
