http://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/jul/05/saturdayreviewsfeatres.guardianreview
2b or not 2b?
Despite doom-laden prophecies, texting has not been the disaster for
language many feared, argues linguistics professor David Crystal. On the
contrary, it improves children's writing and spelling
Article: Will Self and Lynn Truss on the joy and horrors of texting
Article: Will Self and Lynn Truss on the joy and horrors of texting
vandalism? Teenager
texting on a mobile phone. Photograph: Martin Godwin
Last year, in a newspaper article headed "I h8 txt msgs: How
texting is wrecking our language", John Humphrys argued that texters are
"vandals who are doing to our language what Genghis Khan did to his
neighbours 800 years ago. They are destroying it: pillaging our punctuation;
savaging our sentences; raping our vocabulary. And they must be stopped."
As a new variety of language, texting has been condemned as
"textese", "slanguage", a "digital virus".
According to John Sutherland of University College London, writing in this
paper in 2002, it is "bleak, bald, sad shorthand. Drab shrinktalk ...
Linguistically it's all pig's ear ... it masks dyslexia, poor spelling and
mental laziness. Texting is penmanship for illiterates."
Ever since the arrival of printing - thought to be the invention of the
devil because it would put false opinions into people's minds - people have
been arguing that new technology would have disastrous consequences for
language. Scares accompanied the introduction of the telegraph, telephone, and
broadcasting. But has there ever been a linguistic phenomenon that has aroused
such curiosity, suspicion, fear, confusion, antagonism, fascination, excitement
and enthusiasm all at once as texting? And in such a short space of time. Less
than a decade ago, hardly anyone had heard of it.
The idea of a point-to-point short message service (or SMS) began to be
discussed as part of the development of the Global System for Mobile
Communications network in the mid-1980s, but it wasn't until the early 90s that
phone companies started to develop its commercial possibilities. Text
communicated by pagers were replaced by text messages, at first only 20
characters in length. It took five years or more before numbers of users
started to build up. The average number of texts per GSM customer in 1995 was
0.4 per month; by the end of 2000 it was still only 35.
The slow start, it seems, was because the companies had trouble working
out reliable ways of charging for the new service. But once procedures were in
place, texting rocketed. In the UK, in 2001, 12.2bn text messages were sent.
This had doubled by 2004, and was forecast to be 45bn in 2007. On Christmas Day
alone in 2006, over 205m texts went out. World figures went from 17bn in 2000
to 250bn in 2001. They passed a trillion in 2005. Text messaging generated
around $70bn in 2005. That's more than three times as much as all Hollywood box
office returns that year.
People think that the written language seen on mobile phone screens is
new and alien, but all the popular beliefs about texting are wrong. Its graphic
distinctiveness is not a new phenomenon, nor is its use restricted to the
young. There is increasing evidence that it helps rather than hinders literacy.
And only a very tiny part of it uses a distinctive orthography. A trillion text
messages might seem a lot, but when we set these alongside the multi-trillion
instances of standard orthography in everyday life, they appear as no more than
a few ripples on the surface of the sea of language. Texting has added a new
dimension to language use, but its long-term impact is negligible. It is not a
disaster.
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. When messages are
longer, containing more information, the amount of standard orthography
increases. Many texters alter just the grammatical words (such as
"you" and "be"). As older and more conservative language
users have begun to text, an even more standardised style has appeared. Some
texters refuse to depart at all from traditional orthography. And conventional
spelling and punctuation is the norm when institutions send out information
messages, as in this university text to students: "Weather Alert! No
classes today due to snow storm", or in the texts which radio listeners
are invited to send in to programmes. These institutional messages now form the
majority of texts in cyberspace - and several organisations forbid the use of
abbreviations, knowing that many readers will not understand them. Bad
textiquette.
Research has made it clear that the early media hysteria about the
novelty (and thus the dangers) of text messaging was misplaced. In one American
study, less than 20% of the text messages looked at showed abbreviated forms of
any kind - about three per message. And in a Norwegian study, the proportion
was even lower, with just 6% using abbreviations. In my own text collection, the
figure is about 10%.
People seem to have swallowed whole the stories that youngsters use
nothing else but abbreviations when they text, such as the reports in 2003 that
a teenager had written an essay so full of textspeak that her teacher was
unable to understand it. An extract was posted online, and quoted incessantly,
but as no one was ever able to track down the entire essay, it was probably a
hoax.
There are several distinctive features of the way texts are written that
combine to give the impression of novelty, but none of them is, in fact,
linguistically novel. Many of them were being used in chatroom interactions
that predated the arrival of mobile phones. Some can be found in pre-computer
informal writing, dating back a hundred years or more.
The most noticeable feature is the use of single letters, numerals, and
symbols to represent words or parts of words, as with b "be" and 2
"to". They are called rebuses, and they go back centuries. Adults who
condemn a "c u" in a young person's texting have forgotten that they
once did the same thing themselves (though not on a mobile phone). In countless
Christmas annuals, they solved puzzles like this one:
YY U R YY U B I C U R YY 4 ME
("Too wise you are . . .")
Similarly, the use of initial letters for whole words (n for
"no", gf for "girlfriend", cmb "call me back") is
not at all new. People have been initialising common phrases for ages. IOU is
known from 1618. There is no difference, apart from the medium of
communication, between a modern kid's "lol" ("laughing out
loud") and an earlier generation's "Swalk" ("sealed with a
loving kiss").
In texts we find such forms as msg ("message") and xlnt
("excellent"). Almst any wrd cn be abbrvted in ths wy - though there
is no consistency between texters. But this isn't new either. Eric Partridge
published his Dictionary of Abbreviations in 1942. It contained dozens of
SMS-looking examples, such as agn "again", mth "month", and
gd "good" - 50 years before texting was born.
English has had abbreviated words ever since it began to be written
down. Words such as exam, vet, fridge, cox and bus are so familiar that they
have effectively become new words. When some of these abbreviated forms first
came into use, they also attracted criticism. In 1711, for example, Joseph Addison
complained about the way words were being "miserably curtailed" - he
mentioned pos (itive) and incog (nito). And Jonathan Swift thought that
abbreviating words was a "barbarous custom".
What novelty there is in texting lies chiefly in the way it takes further
some of the processes used in the past. Some of its juxtapositions create forms
which have little precedent, apart from in puzzles. All conceivable types of
feature can be juxtaposed - sequences of shortened and full words (hldmecls
"hold me close"), logograms and shortened words (2bctnd "to be
continued"), logograms and nonstandard spellings (cu2nite) and so on.
There are no less than four processes combined in iowan2bwu "I only want
to be with you" - full word + an initialism + a shortened word + two
logograms + an initialism + a logogram. And some messages contain unusual
processes: in iohis4u "I only have eyes for you", we see the addition
of a plural ending to a logogram. One characteristic runs through all these
examples: the letters, symbols and words are run together, without spaces. This
is certainly unusual in the history of special writing systems. But few texts
string together long sequences of puzzling graphic units.
There are also individual differences in texting, as in any other
linguistic domain. In 2002, Stuart Campbell was found guilty of the murder of
his 15-year-old niece after his text message alibi was shown to be a forgery.
He had claimed that certain texts sent by the girl showed he was innocent. But
a detailed comparison of the vocabulary and other stylistic features of his own
text messages and those of his niece showed that he had written the messages
himself. The forensic possibilities have been further explored by a team at the
University of Leicester. The fact that texting is a relatively unstandardised
mode of communication, prone to idiosyncrasy, turns out to be an advantage in
such a context, as authorship differences are likely to be more easily
detectable than in writing using standard English.
Texters use deviant spellings - and they know they are deviant. But they
are by no means the first to use such nonstandard forms as cos
"because", wot "what", or gissa "give us a".
Several of these are so much part of English literary tradition that they have
been given entries in the Oxford English Dictionary. "Cos" is there
from 1828 and "wot" from 1829. Many can be found in literary dialect
representations, such as by Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Walter Scott, DH
Lawrence, or Alan Bleasdale ("Gissa job!").
Sending a message on a mobile phone is not the most natural of ways to
communicate. The keypad isn't linguistically sensible. No one took
letter-frequency considerations into account when designing it. For example,
key 7 on my mobile contains four symbols, pqrs. It takes four key-presses to
access the letter s, and yet s is one of the most frequently occurring letters
in English. It is twice as easy to input q, which is one of the least
frequently occurring letters. It should be the other way round. So any strategy
that reduces the time and awkwardness of inputting graphic symbols is bound to
be attractive.
Abbreviations were used as a natural, intuitive response to a
technological problem. And they appeared in next to no time. Texters simply
transferred (and then embellished) what they had encountered in other settings.
We have all left notes in which we have replaced an and by an &, a three by
a 3, and so on. Anglo-Saxon scribes used abbreviations of this kind.
But the need to save time and energy is by no means the whole story of
texting. When we look at some texts, they are linguistically quite complex.
There are an extraordinary number of ways in which people play with language -
creating riddles, solving crosswords, playing Scrabble, inventing new words.
Professional writers do the same - providing catchy copy for advertising
slogans, thinking up puns in newspaper headlines, and writing poems, novels and
plays. Children quickly learn that one of the most enjoyable things you can do
with language is to play with its sounds, words, grammar - and spelling.
The drive to be playful is there when we text, and it is hugely
powerful. Within two or three years of the arrival of texting, it developed a
ludic dimension. In short, it's fun.
To celebrate World Poetry day in 2007, T-Mobile tried to find the UK's
first "Txt laureate" in a competition for the best romantic poem in
SMS. They had 200 entrants, and as with previous competitions the entries were
a mixture of unabbreviated and abbreviated texts.
The winner, Ben Ziman-Bright, wrote conventionally:
The wet rustle of rain
can dampen today. Your text
buoys me above oil-rainbow puddles
like a paper boat, so that even
soaked to the skin
I am grinning.
The runner-up did not:
O hart tht sorz
My luv adorz
He mAks me liv
He mAks me giv
Myslf 2 him
As my luv porz
(The author of the latter was, incidentally, in her late 60s.)
The length constraint in text-poetry fosters economy of expression in
much the same way as other tightly constrained forms of poetry do, such as the
haiku or the Welsh englyn. To say a poem must be written within 160 characters
at first seems just as pointless as to say that a poem must be written in three
lines of five, seven, and five syllables. But put such a discipline into the
hands of a master, and the result can be poetic magic. Of course, SMS poetry
has some way to go before it can match the haiku tradition; but then, haikus
have had a head-start of several hundred years.
There is something about the genre which has no parallel elsewhere. This
is nothing to do with the use of texting abbreviations. It is more to do with
the way the short lines have an individual force. Reading a text poem, wrote
Peter Sansom, who co-judged a Guardian competition in 2002, is "an urgent
business ... with a text poem you stay focused as it were in the now of each
arriving line." The impact is evident even in one-liners, whose effect
relies on the kind of succinctness we find in a maxim or proverb. UA Fanthorpe,
Sansom's fellow judge, admired "Basildon: imagine a carpark." And
they both liked "They phone you up, your mum and dad."
Several competitions have focussed on reworking famous lines, titles, or
quotations:
txt me ishmael
zen & T @ f m2 cycl mn10nc
The brevity of the SMS genre disallows complex formal patterning - of,
say, the kind we might find in a sonnet. It isn't so easy to include more than
a couple of images, such as similes, simply because there isn't the space.
Writers have nonetheless tried to extend the potential of the medium. The SMS
novel, for example, operates on a screen-by-screen basis. Each screen is a
"chapter" describing an event in the story. Here is an interactive
example from 2005, from an Indian website called "Cloakroom":
Chptr 6: While Surching 4 Her Father, Rita Bumps In2 A Chaiwalla &
Tea Spills On Her Blouse. She Goes Inside Da Washroom, & Da Train Halts @ A
Station.
In Japan, an author known as Yoshi has had a huge success with his
text-messaging novel Deep Love. Readers sent feedback as the story unfolded,
and some of their ideas were incorporated into it. He went on to make a film of
the novel.
A mobile literature channel began in China in 2004. The
"m-novel", as it is called, started with a love story,
"Distance", by writer and broadcaster Xuan Huang. A young couple get
to know each other because of a wrongly sent SMS message. The whole story is
1008 Chinese characters, told in 15 chapters, with one chapter sent each day.
Plainly, there are severe limits to the expressive power of the medium,
when it is restricted to a screen in this way. So it is not surprising that,
very early on, writers dispensed with the 160-character constraint, and engaged
in SMS creative writing of any length using hard copy. Immediately there was a
problem. By taking the writing away from the mobile phone screen, how could the
distinctiveness of the genre be maintained? So the stylistic character of SMS
writing changed, and texting abbreviations, previously optional, became
obligatory.
Several SMS poets, such as Norman Silver, go well beyond text-messaging
conventions, introducing variations in line-shape, type-size, font, and colour
that are reminiscent of the concrete poetry creations of the 1960s. They
illustrate the way the genre is being shaped by the more powerful applications
available on computers.
In 2007 Finnish writer Hannu Luntiala published The Last Messages, in
which the whole 332-page narrative consists of SMS messages. It tells the story
of an IT-executive who resigns his job and travels the world, using text
messages to keep in touch with everyone. And the growing independence of the
genre from its mobile-phone origins is well illustrated by the French novelist
Phil Marso, who published a book in 2004 written entirely in French SMS
shorthand, Pas Sage a Taba vo SMS - a piece of word-play intended to discourage
young people from smoking. The next year he produced L, an SMS retelling of
French poetic classics.
An extraordinary number of doom-laden prophecies have been made about
the supposed linguistic evils unleashed by texting. Sadly, its creative
potential has been virtually ignored. But five years of research has at last
begun to dispel the myths. The most important finding is that texting does not
erode children's ability to read and write. On the contrary, literacy improves.
The latest studies (from a team at Coventry University) have found strong
positive links between the use of text language and the skills underlying
success in standard English in pre-teenage children. The more abbreviations in
their messages, the higher they scored on tests of reading and vocabulary. The
children who were better at spelling and writing used the most textisms. And
the younger they received their first phone, the higher their scores.
Children could not be good at texting if they had not already developed
considerable literacy awareness. Before you can write and play with abbreviated
forms, you need to have a sense of how the sounds of your language relate to
the letters. You need to know that there are such things as alternative
spellings. If you are aware that your texting behaviour is different, you must
have already intuited that there is such a thing as a standard. If you are
using such abbreviations as lol and brb ("be right back"), you must
have developed a sensitivity to the communicative needs of your textees.
Some people dislike texting. Some are bemused by it. But it is merely
the latest manifestation of the human ability to be linguistically creative and
to adapt language to suit the demands of diverse settings. There is no disaster
pending. We will not see a new generation of adults growing up unable to write
proper English. The language as a whole will not decline. In texting what we
are seeing, in a small way, is language in evolution.
· Txtng: The Gr8 Db8
is published this week by OUP. To order a copy for £9.99 with free UK p&p
go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop
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