Language and Technology

   Most people describe texting as a phenomenon that has taken the world by storm. The virus that caused poor spelling, unnecessary abbreviations, non-caps, limited vocabulary and grammatical mistakes performed by the younger age group of today; resulting a negative impact on language itself but from a linguist perspective, what does David Crystal and John Mcwhorter have to say?

   Prior to writing his commentary, David Crystal did his research and collected decent amount of data such as the types of abbreviations that are constructed by people to support his argument. So many abbreviations till the point where it seems over-exaggerated. In his commentary, he referred to the linguistic affects of texting as textspeak. Crystal described textspeak as a new medium for language.

“In textspeak, we are seeing, in a small way, language in evolution.” Crystal’s closing sentence.

   John McWhorter on the other hand looks more into the history of textspeak and its formation. He comes up with different examples of speech and said that the way people talk to each other is called casual speech, 7-10 word packets. McWhorter’s main point was that texting is just writing the way we speak. Technological advancements had led to this point where we can write like we speak because as McWhorter mentioned,

“Once you have things in your pocket that can receive that message, then you have the conditions that allow that we can write like we speak.”

   The impact texting has made on language as a whole isn’t a really significant one according to the two linguists. Both linguists believe that textspeak is a new way of writing that is being developed alongside their true writing skills and that they’re two separate things used at different circumstances. Some might have mistaken the concepts impact on language and social impacts but that’s another topic that is not to be discussed on this one.