Texting is killing language. JK!

Texting is killing language. JK!

Jhon McWhorter

Many assumptions that texting is a scourge the idea is that texting spells the decline and fall of any kind of serious literacy, or at least writing ability among young people in the United States and  the whole world today. In fact it is not true, texting is not writing at all, basically the language has been around for 150,000 years at least 80,000 years of conversation language appeared and people began to speak competently. Writing is a new thing to arise later, according to estimates if humanity has been around for 24 hours then writing appears around 11:07 pm, although it seems slow but writing has advantages as we write we do consciously and we can look back In our writing, the scope of use we use is much broader than if we are conversing. For example, imagine a passage from Edward Gibbon’s The decline and Fall of The Roman Empire ”The whole engagement lasted above twelve hours, till the gradual 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”.

            When we have things in our pocket that can receive that message, then we have the conditions that allow that we can write like we speak and that’s where texting comes in. texting is very loose in its structure, no one thinks about capital letters or punctuation when one texts. Texting is fingered speech, that’s what texting is. Although there is the assumption that we do not heed what has been learned on the board, so we think that there is something wrong with texting and this is a very natural instinct. But the fact of the matter is that what is going on is kind of emergent complexity. That’s what we are seeing in this fingered speech. And in order to understand it, what we want to see is the way, in this new kind of language, there is new structure coming up. For example there is in texting a convention which is LOL. LOL we generally think of as meaning “laughing out loud” and of course theoretically it does and if you look at older texts, then people used it to actually indicate laughing out loud, but now It can have varied meanings such as being a symbol of empathy and accommodation. In addition to the word LOL there are various abbreviations that are often in use as a slash that can be developed meaning. So, according to John Mc Whorter texting is what we’re seeing is 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. That’s certainly true of being bidialectal in term of your writing. Texting actually is evidence of a balancing act that young people are using today, not consciously of course but it’s an expansion of their linguistic repertoire.