Now we can get into the idea of textspeak/textisms. What words and spellings are people using when they are texting or messaging? Do these hold true across different populations? And do these usages have any impact on users’ abilities to use more formal registers of a language?
Features of ‘Textspeak’
On a general level, it seems like the same categories of (English) textisms appear in samples both from native speakers and from non-native speakers. Abbreviations and omitted words tend to be common (Fenianos 68, Haas 386). Non standard spellings may be used to indicate informality, to cut down on keystrokes, or to “suggest pronunciation or, more precisely, to draw attention to associations between…ways of pronouncing words and certain regional and cultural dialects” (Haas 386). This latter function would include spelling differences like ‘partay’ for ‘party’ and ‘goin’ for ‘going’. Meanwhile, acronyms (‘lol’, ‘omg’) and alphabetisms (‘c’ for ‘see’, and similar examples) seem to be used less frequently by non-native speakers. This may be because extracting the meaning of these forms requires another step of coding/decoding which non-native speakers may find to be more labor-intensive (Fenianos 70-71).
Message content tended to include vague references – although this is more likely a reflection of the informal register, rather than a reflection of the message format itself (68). Pronouns were frequent, and determiners were used when discussing time (specifically future plans), shared experiences, or when referring to the conversation itself (67-68). Users also made frequent use of “response tokens”, which are messages which are not communicating new information but are simply acknowledging and displaying interest in what a user has said (68-69). My guess these response tokens occur frequently because we lack the simultaneous feedback we usually receive in face-to-face conversations (check out Week 2 for more discussion of simultaneous feedback).
Some features added to a message, rather than abbreviating words. Users used emoticons “meant to mimic the human face and capture what is communicated…in face-to-face communication” (Haas 396) – in other words, to convey expression and tone. In a similar vein, sound words (like ‘haha’ to indicate laughter) showed up in multiple samples (Tagliamonte 15). Phatic words or phrases, like ‘lol’ or ‘wow’, also appeared frequently, and usually acted more to show participant engagement or to move the conversation along than to communicate actual information (15-16, Haas 392, 395). In Tagliamonte’s sample, for instance, ‘lol’ occurred more often at transitions in the conversation, in a final position, or by itself than at the beginning or middle of a message (16).
Some things were generally left out of messages. Determiners referring to a location tended to be rare, since conversation participants do not have a shared experience of space and location (Fenianos 67). Sign-offs or goodbyes were less frequent than greetings (69). This may be because conversations can take place over an extended period of time, making it difficult to partition where one conversation ends and another begins. Greetings, on the other hand, could be used to draw a user’s attention back to the ongoing conversation in a polite way (“Good morning! Are we still planning to meet up later?”).
In terms of structure, the sampled messages tended to be limited in the number of clauses included per message. In the sample of non-native speakers, most utterances tended to include a single clause; there were no utterances which contained more than three clauses (67). When there were multiple clauses, they tended to be connected via a comma or simply forgo an explicit connector, like ‘and’, altogether.
Why Nonstandard Features?
Why are we seeing some of these nonstandard features? Fenianos says “The participants have seemingly resorted to this writing style because it is easy, fast, and time-saving” (70). Haas disagrees with this assessment, saying that “brevity and speed are not of primary importance for these writers”, because if this were the case we would not be seeing “tensions between abbreviated and elaborated forms” (389). These elaborated or additive forms made up 67% of the features of her corpus of instant messages (389). Haas points out that these additive features “inscribe… oral features of language use into the written conversation” (390). So Haas argues that users are adding features to their messages in order to evoke some elements of oral speech that would otherwise be unmarked. But these users are not marking every element of oral speech or their exact pronunciation (394). So the goal of these users is not to transcribe their own speech, but to use these nonstandard features strategically in order to convey the meaning they wish to convey.
But it does seem like brevity does play some sort of role when it comes to choosing how to convey a message. Take the use of ‘so’ and ‘going to’; in both cases, these phrases are becoming more frequent in spoken language in the Toronto region, where Tagliamonte’s study was based. In the SMS portion of her data she did find that ‘so’ was being used at roughly the same rate as it was in face-to-face conversations (20). On the other hand we have ‘going to’, which has been displacing ‘will’ in the Toronto region (23). But in the SMS data, ‘will’ and its contracted forms were much more frequently used than ‘going to’ (24). If texting language is solely influenced by a texters’ spoken speech, then ‘going to’ should be overtaking ‘will’ in the data sample. Because we see this is not the case, we might guess that ‘will’ has remained in common usage because it is much briefer than ‘going to’ and that ‘so’ is appearing more frequently because it is shorter than other intensifiers such as ‘very’.
In short, it seems that neither brevity nor spoken language are the sole drivers of what word choice and features people are using when they communicate through means like texting or instant messaging.
Impact on Formal Writing Skills
The formal language skills of young adults, at least according to Tagliamonte’s 2016 study, do not appear to be negatively influenced by their texting habits (27). This study was unique in that it collected formal writing samples from each of the 45 college-aged participants (7). Their writing samples had intact standard grammar, and did not have nonstandard word forms (13). It is possible that there might be more confusion of registers among younger students, but this study seems to indicate that young adults who text or message in nonstandard English are not doing so due to lack of education or knowledge about standard English.
Remaining Questions
One thing that does need to be considered is all of the studies cited drew from populations of teenagers or young adults. Studies looking at a different or wider age bracket could give us some insight as to whether these features tend to be retained by users as they age, and whether there is any divide between the habits of older and younger texters. Ensuring that these samples also come from populations who are diverse in other ways (race, class, etc) would help to provide an even better picture of how common these forms are across different groups.
Citations
Fenianos, Christelle Frangieh. “Internet Language: An Investigation into the Features of Textisms in an ESL/EFL Context.” Journal of Arts and Humanities, vol. 9, no. 2, 2020, pp. 63-74. https://theartsjournal.org/index.php/site/article/view/1848/835. Accessed 6 Nov 2022.
Haas, Christina, et al. “Young People’s Everyday Literacies: The Language Features of Instant Messaging.” Research in the Teaching of English, vol. 45, no. 4, 2011, pp. 378–404. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23050580. Accessed 6 Nov 2022.
Tagliamonte, Sali A. “So Sick or so Cool? The Language of Youth on the Internet.” Language in Society, vol. 45, no. 1, 2016, pp. 1–32. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43904632. Accessed 6 Nov 2022.