Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Phone?
I don’t like textpeak. There, I said it. I want to go back to writing letters…. because receiving something other than garbage or bills in the mail can make your whole day. But there is a linguistics expert, one David Crystal, who is looking to texting, not as something to be feared and shunned, but as “as a force for, and signifier of, linguistic ability” and a way for young people to have private communications. I wouldn’t know if I’d buy that, but perhaps one day I’ll read the book. Still, I admit he’s probably better versed on the subject than I am and that English is remarkably resilient even as it changes. For now, we will suppose that it can survive texting, pending the onset of arthritis. Check out this London Times review of The Gr8 Db8 by David Crystal.
The Times review by Melissa Katsoulis
WHAT’S SMALL, CHEAP, ubiquitous on streets all over Britain, and apt to bring staunch defenders of the English language out in hives? No, not a greengrocer’s price sign advertising “Strawberry’s”. The humble mobile phone.
Because since mobiles began their steady march from the periphery of technology into our back pockets, the attendant menace of textspeak has been frightening the bejesus out of parents, teachers and correspondents to letters pages all over the land. Stories abound of students handing in essays written completely in SMS lingo, of children losing the ability to spell and, perhaps most insultingly to the younger generation, of them losing the ability to discern between situations when it’s appropriate to write abbreviated English and those when it isn’t.
But are these fears justified? According to the linguistics expert David Crystal, they are not. Indeed, according to his excellent new study txting: the gr8 db8, quite the reverse might be true. Crystal presents a compelling argument in favour of texting as a force for, and signifier of, linguistic ability.
However he admits that, perhaps uniquely among all forms of written communication, it is almost impossible to gather large amounts of data on text messages. Well, would you be willing to give all your ingoing and outgoing texts over to a researcher? Neither he nor the many foreign academics he quotes have had much luck persuading people to surrender their unexpurgated inboxes. So the various weird and wonderful examples of text-speak in his book are presented with the proviso that they might not be exactly ubiquitous.
But what he has discovered makes for fascinating reading. You might think that the text messages exchanged so furiously by young people are gobbledygook. Certainly messages such as “prw, ttyl” (“parents watching, talk to you later”) are hard for the uninitiated to understand. But that is the point. The importance of private linguistic spaces is crucial to young Britain’s love for texting. And this gives a fascinating clue as to why texting took so long to catch on in the US: in a country where kids have traditionally had landlines in their bedrooms, and where they spend more time driving cars than sitting on public transport, texting was never going to provide the communicative magic bullet that it did in the UK.
But in the US, the UK and in the other countries whose SMS habits have been studied by Crystal, there is one universal fact that will leave text-hating parents and teachers reeling. Sorry to break it to you, but when you analyse the actual contents of text messages, the vast majority are written using utterly standard orthography. Even those keyed in by the clique-iest, most iconoclastic youngsters.
Yes, they use the abbreviations and initialisms. But so do all of us – not even the Queen, we presume, spells out “postscript” when she writes a note. And yes, they make intelligent use of the ancient art of rebuses (linguistic games in which letters are substituted by phonetically matching numbers, or logograms, as in the title of Crystal’s book). But so have playful children since time immemorial. Remember “YY UR YY UB I C U R YY 4 ME”? But to make oneself quickly and easily understood, which is of course the goal of all texters, you have to have a good grounding in grammar and sentence structure in the first place. Put simply, kids who text are kids who are literate.
This fact becomes clearer when the fascinating data collected from mobile-phone users beyond the UK is examined. Take the Italians. When they want to text the common word per, meaning “for”, they use the “x” symbol – because the phonetic rendering of the multiplication sign is per. And although there is no letter “k” in the Italian alphabet, they have borrowed it from English to save time keying in che. So their word for “why”, perché becomes simply “xk”. This shows a sophisticated command of code-mixing.
And if you’re wondering about Chinese, well, wonder you might, because in Chinese languages in which the symbols are made up of complex, interlinked lines, the technology is still lacking to translate these into text-friendly icons. Instead, the widely used phonetic system pin-yin is used, which uses the Roman alphabet to approximate the sound of words. So next time you want to text a friend in Beijing telling her that you feel sad, you need only write “555” – the number 5 being pronounced as wu and the word wuwuwu being the Pinyin form of the word for “whimper”. Simple!
Professor Crystal shows us that fears over the impact of technology on language are nothing new. Witness the hysteria at the birth of the printing press. Andtelegrams: did everyone start saying the word “stop” between sentences when telegraphic communication was at its height? Of course not.
History shows that the written word can cope with all sorts of new media, and our brains are well equipped for the dexterity required to harness their uses. There is evidence that texting’s unique blend of informality and anonymity means that it can help people quit smoking, speak out about bullying, and conduct relationships in privacy and with greater diplomacy.
