With increasing technological advances, texting is the primary way that individuals communicate. Through colloquialisms and abbreviations, texting has become its own language called textese. Various linguists have expressed... [ view full abstract ]
With increasing technological advances, texting is the primary way that individuals communicate. Through colloquialisms and abbreviations, texting has become its own language called textese. Various linguists have expressed concern for the way youth have adopted this practice, calling textese ambiguous and cryptic (Humphrys, 2007; Sutherland, 2002). However, with the introduction of spell-check, autocorrect, and smartphones, acronyms such as ‘IMHO’ for ‘In my humble opinion‘, run the risk of being outdated. Recent studies by Ouelette and Michud (2016) show that university students use abbreviations infrequently and only in certain contexts.
The primary research question for this study was: How often and in what contexts do individuals abbreviate in texts, when they have spell-check and autocorrect options? The hypothesis was that students abbreviate infrequently due to technological advancements, contrary to language purists. Reasons for abbreviations varied according to language background, educational experience, and cell-phone type.
Results indicate that 34 of the 40 college students and staff never use abbreviations with superiors or elderly in fear of misunderstanding. When they do, they keep abbreviations short and coherent with close friends and relatives. 3 participants diverged from this result, saying that they accustomed themselves to certain abbreviations on their flip phones. This implies that texting has not degraded the English language and a revision in academic discourse surrounding texting practices is necessary to show the evolution of electronically-mediated communication.
