A LINGUISTIC RENAISSANCE
Teenage text-messaging is not ruining young people's linguistic skills - as many fear - but rather represents "an expansive new linguistic renaissance". That, at least, is the conclusion of a study out of the University of Toronto. The researchers analysed over one million words of teen instant messages and compared this written data to a quarter of a million words of a adolescent speech. They found that messaging gave youngsters the opportunity to show off their linguistic skills and use more formal vocabulary and structures than it was acceptable to use in speech. So, for instance, where they would say 'He was like, "What's up?" ', they would tend to write 'He said, "Whats's up?" '. Instant messaging requires you to think about the shortest, clearest way of expressing an idea; undoubtedly a good thing. What's more, the use of abbreviations such as BTW (= By The Way) and LOL (= laughing out loud) has been greatly exaggerated; only 2.4% of words were abbreviated. Even the use of 'u' for its homophone 'you' only occurred in 10% of cases. Abbreviation seems to be used most by the youngest users of instant messaging, who grow out of it as they get older.
(breakingnewsenglish)
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