Is texting ruining the English language?

By Bekki Poland

 

'It is pillaging our punctuation; savaging our sentences; raping our vocabulary.' These aggressive claims come from John Humphrys in his Mail online article. It seems these are thoughts that he shares with many people in today's society.  But are they giving texting a fair chance?  Maybe they're just stuck in their ways and to stubborn to consider that a change in English language could be beneficial.

 

There are, however, people who are happy to fight on texting's behalf. David Crystal the author of the book 'txtng: the gr8 db8' being one of them. Crystal's book claims that texting has improved children's spelling and writing.

 

 In his article '2b or not 2b' he says that 'Although many texters enjoy breaking linguistic rules, they also know they need to be understood. There is no point in paying to send a message if it breaks so many rules that it ceases to be intelligible.' He explains that children have to know how to spell before they can abbreviate the text, how can they abbreviate a word if they don't know how to spell it to begin with?  Crystal claims that people have misguided thoughts about texting, they believe that every text is full of abbreviations and is impossible to decipher, however this is not the case. In an American study only 20% of text messages looked at, contained any form of abbreviation. So most texts are actually written in standard form.

 

Adrian Beard's book of 'Language change' says that many people in the great texting debate tend to overlook the fact that text messaging is a new genre, so it can't be fairly judged against formal, standard, written English. Beard claims that when the news story broke about a girl who had written her whole GCSE English exam in text message, people started making broad claims about the 'complete deterioration in all formal standards of writing.' Without considering that texting can't be considered as a formal standard of writing, it needs to have it own genre.

 

Another approach to this debate is that the language used in texts isn't new at all. Crystal says that some features of texts go back hundreds of years. For example, initialising sentences has been around for ages, an example being IOU which came about in 1618. Tell me, how is LOL (laugh out loud) any different from SWALK (sealed with a loving kiss)?

 

Not only this but the English language has had abbreviated words ever since it began. The words exam (examination) and fridge (refrigerator) are clear examples that these abbreviations can become integrated within the English language. People aren't still claiming that these abbreviations are ruining the language. So over time maybe the haters of text messaging will come to use texts themselves.

 

Does this mean that texting is just an expansion on features of the language that already existed? I think so.  People have just taken these features and created a whole new form of communication based around them. So I ask; how can text messages be ruining the English language if they are only using features that already existed?