[TED.COM] by John McWhorter "Texting is killing language".

 summary ted talk

John McWhorter talks about texting is killing language. The idea is that texting spells the decline and fall of any kind of serious literacy, or at least writing ability. Language has existed for perhaps 150,000 years, at least 80,000 years, and what it arose as is speech. Writing is something that came along much later. Writing has certain advantages when you write, because it's a conscious process, and you can look backwards. Casual speech is something quite different. Speech is much looser, more telegraphic, and much less reflective. It is very different from writing.

The speaker tells that texting involves the brute mechanics of something that we call writing is fingered speech. Now we can write the way we talk. And it's a very interesting thing, but nevertheless easy to think that still it represents some sort of decline. We see this general bagginess of the structure, the lack of concern with rules and the way that we're used to learning on the blackboard, and so we think that something has gone wrong. It's a very natural sense. For  example, there is in texting a convention, which is LOL. Now LOL, we generally think of as meaning "laughing out loud."  theoretically, it does, and if you look at older texts, then people used it to actually indicate laughing out loud. But if you text now, or if you are someone who is aware of the substrate of texting the way it's become, you'll notice that LOL does not mean laughing out loud anymore. It's evolved into something that is much subtler. Another example is "slash." Now, we can use slash in the way that we're used to, along the lines of, "We're going to have a party-slash-networking session." That's kind of like what we're at. Slash is used in a very different way in texting among young people today. It's used to change the scene.

John concludes that texting these days is that what we're seeing is a whole new way of writingthat 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 terms of your writing. And so 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.