What will be the long-term effect on the English language of text messaging?

Question

Will the practice of misspelling and abbreviating words in text messaging have a permanent effect on our written and oral language?

Answer 1

Definitely. The students in my high school class don't know how to spell, use punctuation, or use capitalization correctly because they don't practice it every day. They don't bother. Perhaps this is a result of the whole language movement we saw a few years ago, but I tend to think it's a result of their modern use of language. Even though I don't like what I see and will continue to deduct points from papers for errors, languages adapt.

Answer 2

On written text, most definitely, there will be some long-term effects. Because of the wide usage among both adults and young people, spelling and grammar will be somewhat affected. Thankfully we have more tools now as spell and grammar checkers but I'm more concerned of the younger generation who are too immersed in shortcut-filled lingo of text and instant messaging, and have not had gone through the required maturation in the learning of language arts (run-on sentence).

Then again, btw it's only my pov : ), cmiiw but TM n IM hv been round for a long time ; ) and I haven't noticed any big changes in the way I communicate. I'm sure it will all be fubar.... :-P g2g ltr

Answer 3

"Will" it? Doesn't it already? Grown men and women spell and speak as if they are nine year olds. If a child in my day would speak and spell the way we do with the chatspeak and text messaging, he would have been put into special ed classes. And our children, forget about it! We wonder why Russian and Asian children are smarter than our children? American children are plain stupid in comparison. Technology has taken away our ability to think and work and reason for ourselves. Now we just push the "submit" button and get all the answers. We are in what is literally the "Dumbing down of America".

Answer 4

well definitely not the way we speak because we dont really abbreviate let alone even an eigth as much as we do on text messages and instant messaging although most of society has stopped using words of an intelligent vocabulary and started using more slang.

Answer 5

What a great question!! Did you know that educators were recently talking about doing away with the practice of "handwriting" altogether because of computers?? Ridiculous!! Didn't take them long to realize children would then never be able to read handwriting. Star for you! Sandy

Answer 6

no, enough language is still written correctly that the language will not change, a very interesting question though

Answer 7

ys. teh speling and gramer miztakes is teh bomb! Show ne of teh queshuns and ansers to ur inglish teecher. Bring eer plugz.

Answer 8

people will actually begin to forget how to spell properly since now we also have the automatic spell checkers now days.

Answer 9

sure. me and my peeps always use text language when we write notes and im finding it harder to talk and write in the standard way anymore.

Answer 10

of course it will people will forget the correct spelling and become to lazy to even care