“The prophets of doom emerge every time a new technology influences language,” said David Crystal, one of the world’s foremost experts on language, at an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) symposium on the impact of e-mail, text and instant messaging on the English language. “They gathered when printing was introduced in the 15th century, when the telephone was introduced in the 19th century, and when broadcasting came along in the 20th century.
“They gathered again when it was noticed that internet writing broke several of the rules of punctuation, capitalization, and spelling,” he continued. But Crystal has found that few elements of what he dubbed “text-speak” or “net-speak” have entered formal language so far.
Most of the neologisms-new words and expressions-have increased the expressive range of language at the informal level. Yet, to some, this has a downside. “People notice informality and worry about it, thinking it causes deterioration in a language,” said Crystal.
To evaluate the effects these new forms of communication have on language, Naomi Baron, a professor of linguistics at American University in Washington DC, studied the instant messaging (IM) behaviour of American college students by analyzing 2,185 messages from 23 conversations.
She found that an exchanges usually consists of a staccato series of utterances, that males and females have different IM habits, and that students usually multi-task while messaging each other.
Baron found that, on average, IM conversations contained 94 messages and lasted for 24 minutes. Messages averaged 5.4 words; a fifth of them consisted of only a single word. In all the messages, Baron found only 31 abbreviations (the most popular being “k” for okay), 90 acronyms (“lol” being the most common), as well as a tendency to correct one’s own spelling errors in subsequent messages.
More interestingly, Baron discovered gender-based differences in messaging behaviour. “The female messages look more like writing and the male messages look more like speech,” said Baron. Females also used significantly more emoticons (using a colon and a parenthesis to make a “happy face,” for example) than males, and took an average of 41 seconds and 9.8 messages to close a conversation. Males said their goodbyes in 4.3 messages over 16 seconds.
Last, Baron found that IM is largely a background activity. While engaging in an average of 2.7 conversations at a time, 70 per cent of subjects simultaneously surfed the net; about half listened to music. In one focus group, students told Baron, “I couldn’t imagine just having an IM conversation. That would be too weird.'”
“College students don’t really fit the common stereotype about IM,” said Baron. Having had several years’ IM experience by the time they enter university, respondents report having outgrown the stylized net-speak common among high-schoolers, she added.
