OMG! Is texting wrecking our language?

How many times have you heard someone say that texting is ruining your spelling? Or,
perhaps even more dramatically, the whole English language? Its a point of debate that has
only intensified with the advent of smartphones and permanent connection to the Internet
wherever you go, but as you may not be surprised to hear linguists find that the
situation is actually more complicated than that.

- See you l8er?

- LOL

Sali Tagliamonte, along with various colleagues and students at the University of Toronto,
did a study between 2009 and 2010, where they collected almost 200,000 words of data.
These were conversations from emails, texts and instant messenger conversations, which
mostly came from Facebook all forms of computer mediated communication, or CMC for
short. The students, along with these samples, were also asked to show a piece of formal
written work, as a point of comparison. Tagliamonte chose to analyse three different
linguistic features across the corpus: acronyms and other short forms, such as lol;
intensifiers, such as really or literally; and future temporal reference, or more specifically,
the use of go in the future tense. After checking their frequency across the four formats,
Tagliamonte found some interesting results.

Unsurprisingly, the formal written work had no acronyms, and very few intensifiers;
only very, out of all of them, showed up. As for the future tense, the only attested form
was will bog-standard formal English. So far, so boring. Where the interesting divisions lie
is when looking at the different types of CMC.

Emails were found to consistently be the most formal, with writing coming in much larger
chunks than their texted or messaged counterparts, and very few acronyms or intensifiers.
Then there was a tie between SMS (texts) and IM (instant messages), with more rapid
exchange of turns, and far more acronyms and intensifiers. In particular, the
intensifier so was very common in the SMS corpus, probably because this was back in the
dark ages of character limits on text messages. On the other hand, going to as a temporal
marker was actually less common than its other future tense counterparts. This suggests
that, contrary to Tagliamontes original prediction, the use of going to is actually more
conservative than other shortened forms such as ill and ima. The upshot of these
observations, though, is that the students had stable registers across each form of writing,
with the grammar remaining stable in each medium.