Textese killing English? LOL

In An Experiment, Kids Adept At Texting Scored Better In Spelling and Writing Tests

 

London: The most fervently contested debate sparked by the text-messaging phenomenon of the past eight years is over truant letters. “Textese,” a nascent dialect of English that subverts letters and numbers to produce ultra-concise words, is scaring language loyalists and pedagogues.
   Their fears are stoked by some staggering data: This year the world is on track to produce 2.3 trillion messages—a nearly 20% increase from 2007 and almost 150% from 2000. The corresponding revenue for telephone companies is growing nearly as fast—to an estimated $60 billion this year.
   In the English-speaking world, Britain alone generates well over 6 billion messages every month, reported Newsweek. Although people are communicating faster than before, some worry that, as textese drops consonants, vowels and punctuation and makes no distinction between letters and numbers, people will no longer know how we’re really supposed to communicate. Will text messaging produce generations of illiterates? Could this—OMG—be the death of the English language?
   It is not only the linguists that are raising alarm. They’re teachers who have had to correct some ridiculous practices in high-school papers and concerned citizens who believe it their moral duty to write grammar books.
   Britain, one of the first countries where texting became a habit, has produced some bitter anti-texting vitriol; “textese,” wrote John Sutherland in The Guardian, “masks dyslexia.”
   Britain’s most prolific linguist David Crystal’s in his new book Txtng: the Gr8 Db8 makes two general points. He says the language of texting is hardly as deviant as people think, and that texting actually makes young people better communicators, not worse, reported Newsweek. Crystal says Shakespeare freely used elisions, novel syntax and several thousand made-up words. Where the naysayers see destruction, Crystal sees growth. He believes that the theory of evolution for language is the same as the one for life.
   Researchers have examined the effects of texting through an experiment. In one British experiment last year, children who texted—and who wielded plenty of abbreviations—scored higher on reading and vocabulary tests, reported Newsweek. In fact, the more adept they were at abbreviating, the better they did in spelling and writing. The same study also found the children with the highest scores to be the first to have gotten their own cellphones. AGENCIES