![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thoughts on txt spk & aol spk
Jan. 31st, 2005 03:25 pmLots of people these days write in a hybrid dialect which encompasses the Internet acronym-led slang from the 90s (eg. lol, omg, wtf, afaik), the rather abbreviated SMS dialect people use on mobile phones to save on keypresses and message length (eg. ur, 2b, r u, 2moz), and a healthy dose of 3l33t-speek and ASCII art emoticons for good measure.
Obviously there's an element of identifying with youth sub-culture here, as usage seems far more prevalent in the generation of people who grew up with the Internet and mobile phones. Unfortunately, when in 'mixed company', this also has the effect of making people who speak (type?) like this appear to be young and immature, and perhaps less intelligent. Additionally, the original goal of saving keypresses give the impression that the writer is lazy, and the deviation from Standard English is sometimes interpreted as showing a lack of regard for the reader. Using ur as a synonym for both your and you're could be taken as not just laziness but ignorance.
However, there are counter-arguments to this; most people - although not all! - who type like this are perfectly capable of writing Standard English when required to, which undermines the allegations of ignorance and lack of intelligence. As with other accents and dialects - and indeed languages, for the effortlessly bilingual - people switch from one to the other depending on the context. My personal use of such words varies significantly depending on who I'm talking to; I surprised a friend recently by using 'lol' for the first time with them in 18 months of conversation... yet there are others who I use the term with every few minutes.
Laziness is perhaps a harder accusation to address, especially given the ease of switching from one to the other as already mentioned. However it should be said that Standard English is hardly a verbose language when compared to, say, German, and has already gone quite some way towards accommodating the lazy - or to be more positive about it, making communication more efficient - by abbreviating and contracting words (eg. can't, shouldn't, Halloween, photo, flu), legitimising acronyms as real words (eg. laser, radar, scuba, cd), using homonyms that only make sense in context (eg. bank (building) vs. bank (verb) vs. bank (part of river), read (present tense) vs. read (past tense)), etc. So all these things have a precedent.
I think there are parallels with the whole Ebonics idea; the outside world generally views it as somewhat inferior or lazy, and the speakers mainly use it when communicating with others in their cultural group. There are definitely social and psychological issues here, in terms of inclusiveness and exclusiveness. On another level, do we really want cultural relativists making apologies for schoolchildren who don't know the difference between your and you're because they (allegedly) natively speak a dialect where ur is valid in both cases? Although I can see the validity in it, it's not gonna help them in the real world where Standard English is necessary.
Obviously there's an element of identifying with youth sub-culture here, as usage seems far more prevalent in the generation of people who grew up with the Internet and mobile phones. Unfortunately, when in 'mixed company', this also has the effect of making people who speak (type?) like this appear to be young and immature, and perhaps less intelligent. Additionally, the original goal of saving keypresses give the impression that the writer is lazy, and the deviation from Standard English is sometimes interpreted as showing a lack of regard for the reader. Using ur as a synonym for both your and you're could be taken as not just laziness but ignorance.
However, there are counter-arguments to this; most people - although not all! - who type like this are perfectly capable of writing Standard English when required to, which undermines the allegations of ignorance and lack of intelligence. As with other accents and dialects - and indeed languages, for the effortlessly bilingual - people switch from one to the other depending on the context. My personal use of such words varies significantly depending on who I'm talking to; I surprised a friend recently by using 'lol' for the first time with them in 18 months of conversation... yet there are others who I use the term with every few minutes.
Laziness is perhaps a harder accusation to address, especially given the ease of switching from one to the other as already mentioned. However it should be said that Standard English is hardly a verbose language when compared to, say, German, and has already gone quite some way towards accommodating the lazy - or to be more positive about it, making communication more efficient - by abbreviating and contracting words (eg. can't, shouldn't, Halloween, photo, flu), legitimising acronyms as real words (eg. laser, radar, scuba, cd), using homonyms that only make sense in context (eg. bank (building) vs. bank (verb) vs. bank (part of river), read (present tense) vs. read (past tense)), etc. So all these things have a precedent.
I think there are parallels with the whole Ebonics idea; the outside world generally views it as somewhat inferior or lazy, and the speakers mainly use it when communicating with others in their cultural group. There are definitely social and psychological issues here, in terms of inclusiveness and exclusiveness. On another level, do we really want cultural relativists making apologies for schoolchildren who don't know the difference between your and you're because they (allegedly) natively speak a dialect where ur is valid in both cases? Although I can see the validity in it, it's not gonna help them in the real world where Standard English is necessary.
