Chapter II. Is SMS corrupting our language.

 

Recently some people have begun to question whether SMS is corrupting our language - have the confines of 160 characters forced people to rethink how they speak so that they use the shortcuts born of texting even in non-SMS - even face-to-face - conversation? The advent of Twitter has surely pushed us towards the linguistic evolution, and anyone over the age of 30 who has ever had someone, of any age, say to their face "OMG" (pronounced "oh em gee") may well have asked themselves "Is SMS corrupting our language?" (or may have on the spot concluded that SMS is corrupting our language!). But not everyone - including some experts - sees it that way.

Welsh journalist and television reporter John Humphrys has criticized SMS language as "wrecking our language". The author cites ambiguous examples such as "lol" which may mean "laughing out loud", "lots of love", or "little old lady", depending on the context in which it is used. Humphrys describes emoticons and textese as "irritating" and essentially lazy behaviors, and surmises that "sloppy" habits gained while using textese will result in students' growing ignorance of proper grammar and punctuation.

David Chrystal has countered the claims that SMS has a deleterious effect on language with numerous scholarly studies. The findings are summarized in his book Txtng: the Gr8Db8. Despite scholarly research to the contrary, the popular notion that text messaging is damaging to the linguistic development of young people and to the English language itself persists.

As Reuters informs, Irish authorities are anxious about the impact of SMS-messages on writing. The growing popularity of SMS-messages and the like threatens to do away with the standards of writing and here schoolchildren are concerned most of all according to the Irish committee on education.

SMS-language accepts mistakes as a norm, it uses “phonetic” principles of spelling words (they are written in the way the are pronounced), it ignores punctuation and it turns out to be a slang which is different from literary language. As a result, the number of mistakes made by schoolchildren has increased enormously. That was claimed by the Irish National Examination Committee after having surveyed the assessment of last-year exams passed by the schoolchildren at the age of 15.

The main advantage of SMS-language - the least number of characters needed to convey a comprehensible message – transforms into harm to writing. Teenagers who are more likely to use SMS to send information often ignore literacy. That’s why SMS-language is overfilled with shortened sentences, acronyms, the vocabulary is limited, there are no complicated grammar constructions, punctuation, grammar, and capitalization are largely ignored. The pupils start to use the same language daily and they are getting accustomed to write in this manner at school and at home. The consequences are even more frightening while taking into the consideration the fact that Irish schoolchildren at the age of 15 used to be reported as most literally skillful in 2003 and even were highly rated among the top-ten by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development.

It should be pointed out that the mentioned above concern is typical of the whole world which communicates by means of mobile phones and the Internet. Journalists and scientists emphasize the negative impact of SMS-language. In spite of this fact, most of them give optimistic predictions: since a language is a constantly developing system, the problem will be solved in a natural way and the slang will die out in a short time. Nevertheless, all of them declare the necessity to speak correctly and be attentive to proper grammar and spelling. As a matter of fact, it is not so hard to do, isn’t it?

Corrupting Is Not So Bad. Many people have been repelled by abbreviations used in e-mail messages or SMS. Is there any fact that law is being busted as well as the language of immature people starts to be corrupted by their naiveté or misspelling? Actually, people reduce words and teenagers aren’t so careful about pronouncing complicated words. They have been developing similarities to English denunciation yet they don’t know scrupulously how to spell an English word right or accurately.

While advocating this sort of spelling, people replace correct pronunciation, grammar and spelling. There have always been ways to improve a language either it is written or spoken. First of all, English denunciation is a vast disaster when it comes to spelling. Most rules which exist have exceptions. Teaching young kids demands a lot time and effort. G. B. Shaw longed for the English alphabet to be revised so that each letter was supposed to be given its own character. Shaw particularly argued how to spell words were letters were written but sounds were not pronounced, as ‘h’ in ‘enough’, or pronounced in a different way as ‘o’ in the word ‘women’ as well as a ‘ti’- in ‘station’. However, his so-called ‘Shavian’ alphabet of forty or more letters was never taken seriously or sincerely. Secondly, simplification of spelling has already been proposed in the USA, mostly due to the work of their important lexicographer, Noah Webster. He argued which additional (unpronounced) letters could be missed, similar to ‘u’ in ‘colour’, or ‘ough’ in ‘through’ which transformed into “color”, and ‘thru’. Thirdly, why treat abbreviations so intolerably? Difficult hieroglyphics of Egyptians as well as languages similar to Chinese usually have characters which paint differences or ideas, not a phonetic alphabet similar to ours. So we use:< instead of “sad” or < 3 instead of “love” in SMS language. Additionally, a tendency of dropping vowels is not new. There have been minor languages which have an alphabet of consonants like in Georgia. If you were critical about SMS language, you’d better remember the fact that misspelling reflects present-day tendencies and fashion. So, one should keep in mind that differences should be defined and explained while denunciation should be taken for granted.