summary ted Txtng is killing language. JK!!! by John McWhorter

John McWhorter

Actually, texting is a miraculous thing, not just energetic. one thing that we see is that texting is not writing at all. 

Basically, language has existed at least 80,000 years. People talked. Writing is something that came along much later. So first there's speech, and then writing comes along. But writing has certain advantages.

For example, imagine a passage from Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:  "The whole engagement lasted above twelve hours, till the graduate retreat of the Persians was changed into a disorderly flight, of which the shameful example was given by the principal leaders and the Surenas himself."

Nobody talks that way. That is not the way any human being speaks casually. Casual speech is something quite different. Speech is much less reflective, very different from writing. But actually what language is, is speech.

They are two things. speech and writing. in a distant era now, it was common when one gave a speech to basically talk like writing. speaking like writing. But the problem was in the material, materials don't lend themselves to it. Even when we had electric typewriters or then computer keyboards. The fact is, however you can type easily you have to have somebody who can receive your message quickly. And that's where texting comes in. And so, texting is very loose in its structure such as capital letters or punctuation.

Texting is fingered speech. Now we can write the way we talk. But we see this general bagginess of the structure and lack of concern with rules.

There is new structure coming up. For example  : LOL (laughing out loud), theoretically the meaning is correct  and also for distant people it does. But if text now  you notice that LOL It's evolved into something that is much subler. Such as marker of emphaty and accomodation.

LOL has gradually become a pragmatic particle. It's a way of using the language between actual people. Such as japanese use “ne” at the end of a lot of sentences, and black youth use word  “yo” .

Another example is the use of slash. Slash is used in a very different way in texting among young people today. It's used to change the scene.

All spoken languages have what a linguist calls a new information marker or two, or three. Texting has developed one from this slash.

Texting these days is that what we're seeing is a whole new way of writing that young people are developing, which they're using alongside their ordinary writing skills,and that means that they're able to do two things. Increasing evidence is that being bilingual is cognitively beneficial. That's also true of being bidialectal. If somebody from 1973 and 1993 read a very typical text written by a 20 year old today,  Often they would have no idea what half of it meant because a whole new language has developed among our young people .

If he could go into 2033, the first thing he will ask is whether David Simon had done a sequel to the wire. Second thing is what was going on on downton abbey. Then the last thing is please show me a sheaf of texts written by 16-year-old girls, because I would want to know where this language had developed since our times, so we could examine this linguistic miracle happening right under our noses.