Explore the view that speaking, texting and/or web-based interactions can be very creative forms of language use.
“English is a rich and fruitful language”, this high concept quote is something that I have heard over and over again throughout my life in education. However to answer this question this quote has to become adjusted towards the question that needs to be answered. An adjustment to this statement would be “speaking and texting are rich and fruitful creative forms of language use”; therefore changing and manipulating the 136 characters of SMS language and spoken language creating new aspects and concepts.
Spoken language has developed throughout millennia and has changed in so many ways, even though English may not have been the language that has been developing, paralinguistic features such as body language and facial expressions have been developed, therefore these are creative adjustments that change the outcome of a spoken sentence. For example Spoken language has become so powerful that a spoken statement could mean something totally than what was linguistically said. This would be sarcasm and sarcasm is an aspect of language that has many variables, these could be facial expressions, tones of voice or body language. Sarcasm doesn’t have a set of guide lines because it is a very informal way of passing information. This is because of the misinterpretations that people can get in different situations.
To elaborate on sarcasm, sarcasm as referenced before usually influences spoken language using paralinguistic features such as facial expressions and tones of voice. For example, “Nah you don’t say” this common expression would be said using a lower tone but usually quite loud, these aspects change the complete outcome of this expression therefore making the sentence mean the total opposite from its written version. The written comparison would be nah you don’t say that because… but the informal language has just been generally recognised as sarcasm and its meaning in spoken language changed completely. This is an extremely creative way of manipulating spoken language is phenomenal and incredibly interesting make your view switch to the future and wonder what expressions will be created in the future.
Text however comparing to its comparative in this essay has been around for a period of around 20-30 years and is quite new, however the new abbreviations and terminology that are being created to define these adjustments to language are metaphorically like a paint brush to canvas; creative. However all of SMS language has been stringed to one aspect and this would have to be brevity, due to adjacency and the fast busy world that we live in today, information has to become instant and brevity is the terminological name to define this feature. “Hw r u 2day”, this would have to be an everyday message and literally defines brevity, the vowel in the word how has been cut out to make the word shorter and quicker to type however r and u even as just letters sound and mean the same thing they would do if they were actual words. “2day” is the most creative aspect of this phrase. 2 is a number and some scholars have argued that it is stupid to add a number into linguistics, however a shared view is that it is a creative and instantaneous way of passing text. People who use the SMS language have created an entirely different language that seems to hold familiar traits with our own but seems to dip into a different language.
Text however as ingenious as it seems is limited compared to its bigger brother, spoken language. Even if text is so called limited, people have developed new features to break the bounds and limits of text and add new features to text so that the outcome of the words that are written are completely different from what they were before. For example emoticons have been developed to substitute the amount of paralinguistic features that are present during spoken language but lost during a conversation in instant messaging. These paralinguistic features substitute the facial features of those who are talking so if someone adds 😀 to the end of a sentence the entire mood of the sentence changes into a more upbeat conversation because facial expressions also relate towards emotion, hence the name emoticon.
To explain in further detail, emoticons can also relate towards spoken languages sarcasm. Sarcasm can be shown by influencing linguistic, spoken words with paralinguistic features such as smiling or raising the tone of voice while speaking. For example emoticons have a sarcastic face which is :/ this is an incredibly powerful influential feature to use when people are texting each other.
“Your hair looks nice today :/” this shows that the person is not complimenting the person but actually insulting the person who this statement is aimed at and changes the whole agenda of the statement/ comment. People have strived and have developed text into a much friendlier, colourful part of language because seeing a proper smiling face inside text does physiologically make you feel happier because it’s not just black and white font but an actual drawing to imply happiness. This is creative because it breaks the bounds of text by taking aspects from spoken language and implementing into text.
However text has become known to influence our spoken language. Omissions from spoken text has started to change our spoken language, this is probably because the average adult texts over 100 messages a day and so that is over 700 messages a week, this is enormous and all these messages are most likely “yh k” or “np” because we can have instant messages from the touch of button it is so easy to type affirmatives and short, not even sentences but just letters, to say what we are either currently doing or going to do. So the standardisation of everyone having a mobile phone or everybody having a computer or face book account creates the omissions because everybody knows some variant of LOL or gtg because these are so common. An example of this is Facebook; this website is the second most visited site in the world! Or from what I’ve been told; this is because it is a social messaging site. People these days check Facebook over 3 times a day due to instant internet access and so about 4/5 people I know have a Facebook account so to calculate the amount of people in London having a Facebook account; that’s 4/5s out of 9 million, that’s a lot of people. So you could say texting is slowly taking over daily life. This statement has evidence of people now saying LOL, people say this because of the standardisation of text and because everyone knows the term, I don’t need to backtrack to tell you about that however this also is because LOL; “laugh out loud” implies different meanings in different contexts for example people would say LOL to imply that something was funny, but not so funny that it was laughable, which is very useful in some social situations. However this completely defeats the purpose of the acronym because you are not laughing out loud. But to state that these omissions from text affecting spoken language is a bad influence on modern English is controversial, however the saying acronyms determine a characteristic and could be described as a part of either an individual’s or groups specific dialect. So therefore the for argument for LOL would have to argue that the phrase is a creative piece of dialect that is used by certain youth groups to imply that either a gesture or statement was funny or can be used for sarcasm.
To express my opinion on the subject of creativity breaking the laws of the English language and the linguistics of English language; my opinion would have to be positive. As Shakespeare broke the laws of English language and created whole masses of globally known pieces of text, so does the youth of today, they are slowly creating a new effect. Furthermore, this effect would be the younger generation teaching the older generations about their language. For as long as time began it was always the elders that were wise and taught the young but however in this modern age that effect has been reversed and the young will create these useful terms such as ikr and brb and over time the older generations pick up on these phrases to. This is the power of mobile phones and freedom of opinion and speech, these liberties are what drive language further by creating a more artistic language.
However this is only one side of the argument; the other side of the argument is the side which I see as an ignorant view and are a set of opinions that I don’t agree with. Certain people believe that you shouldn’t change the whole structure of development in linguistic and spoken language because when you study language, going back to letters (brb) and images ( 😛 ) could be thought as backtracking on language’s further development, so furthermore this would be slowing it down, this view is understandable. Another faction of this argument would have to be the group of people that think that online interaction such as instant, messaging take away peoples skill to write mass bodies of information with highly detailed thoughts and concepts, also another understandable point but online interaction could also give people new experiences and open peoples mind to the world because you could be talking to people from all over the world and they would have different concepts and dialect to share, this furthermore increases the development of language.
Although these acronyms are just ways to pass information quickly and viably, and online interaction and the endless online advantages of the internet are phenomenal the massively complex SMS language that we use today could be called the language of the information age. This statement could be variously debatable however it is my thought on the future. Therefore the artistic language of the information age could go down in history as our version of Shakespearian literature and holds the same creativity as the great man himself did.
So what are your thoughts on the future of the English language, are we all linguistically doomed or on the brink of a new age for text?
React!