THE LONG AND SHORT OF THE SHORT MESSAGING SYSTEM

                           THE LONG AND SHORT OF THE SHORT MESSAGING SYSTEM

Last month, OUP had organised a seminar in Kolkata  to  guide   teachers  to tackle the threat  posed to English language  from Short Messaging System or SMS or 'textese'  which is now ubiquitous.   "Textese", Slanguage", and  " digital virus" have been some of the uncharitable epithets coined  by many who 'h8 txt msgs'  and find them to be  ' penmanship for the illiterates'. Clearly, the curiosity, suspicion , fear, confusion, and antagonism which attended the introduction of printing, telegraph, telephone and broadcasting have been unprecedentedly   heightened in the case of SMS which has  got the purists' goat. 

The criticism is primarily based on the characteristics of  SMS as they  throw to the winds, with  an air of gay abandon one associates with kindergarten kids  and college teachers at the  break,  or clerks in government offices much before ,   the rules of  grammar and syntax  of the language, spell a spelling disaster, catapult  a whole new world of pronunciation, miscegenate  by 'going native'  with macaronic usages and fundamentally signal an alphabetical revolution by adding substantial logographic elements ( emoticons and rebuses) to a primarily phonemic language. 

However, none of these is linguistically novel. Emoticons, have been there since 1857 when National Telegraphic Review and Operators Guide documented the use of 73 to express 'love and kisses' in Morse code.  And rebuses ( use of single letters , numerals , and symbols to represent words or part of words , e.g. "i <3 u" ) go back centuries . Macaronic texts which use a mixture of languages  arose as early as the end of the Middle Ages and were found prevalent in a contact -of -cultures theatre, like in medieval India,  where the style was used by the famous poet Amir Khusrau. Interestingly, the anglicisation of non- English languages and the de-anglicization of the English language is almost a parallel process.

Responding  to the charge  that SMS is distorting pronunciation, the votaries of SMS   contend that English, which witnessed the Great Vowel Shift around Chaucer's time, and  has a phoneme alphabet (i.e.,  each letter should represent a specific sound), has totally failed. The homophonic and heterophonic  assaults  like  phase/faze,gait/gate, hertz/hurts,witch/which, etc  and row/read/ lead , etc respectively have left gaping holes  in  the phonemic superstructure. To make matters worse, with tongues  sliding  over words  almost like rasam on a banana leaf,  words have been  chewed off from the beginning or the end or the middle to be left as  aphetic ,  apocopic  and syncopic shreds respectively   - ' 'stralia ( Australia), mag ( magazine) and fo'c's'le ( forecastle)!

The criticism that SMS has created words which suffer from ambiguity in that many words have different meanings and contextual,  like 'lol' ( laugh out loud or  lots of love),  is quite droll when English itself is characterised by a polysemic madness of the highest order. 'Fine' has 14 definitions as an adjective, six as a noun and two as an adverb while the word set has to be explained for its different connotations in 60,000 words in OED. Go to You Tube and search for Osho's  ( though this is contested) face with the title ' The meaning of fuck' and see WTF I mean!

It is fairly  facile to raise a dust over introduction of acronyms like  ASAP, AFAIK, KISS, XOXO, ROTFL, etc.  For long, English has been using words like Laser, Sonar, Scuba, Amphetamine, Gestapo, Nato, M3, Aids, IOUs, etc. Besides, the language has been progressively enriched by addition of new words- the Bard himself has given us countless  new words ( about 1700 including countless !). The language has endured much worse- words have been created by mis-hearings (  button- hole from buttonhole, sweetheart from sweetard) and even by as silly a thing as a silly mistake - Robert Browning thought twat as something innocent and even included it in Pippa Passes( 1841)!

Purists rant at spelling errors  the SMS inflicts, forgetting that English spellings have been churned differently at different stages of its evolution-   its Frenchification,  fiddling by the Chancery clerks during Chaucer's times, the orthographic mayhem caused by the Belgian assistants of Caxton's when the printing press reached the island,  the re latinisation following a surge of classicism, e.g., adding 'b' to  dette  to make  debt  and to doutte to  make doubt . Deviant spellings like 'cos' "because"and wot"what" have been in OED since 1828 and 1829 respectively and have been part of English literary tradition.  To label  SMS as  a villainous,  orthographic iconoclast is, therefore,  stretching it too much. 

The cellphone powered Communication Revolution demands, in a multi chat setting, 'immediate turn taking' in very limited space. The extant linguistic practices , with their pythonic agility, are found wanting .  The answer to this challenge  has been textese which tweaks ' conventional discursive practices with linguistic creativity and communicative competence in order to be intimate and social'. So basically, textese  fulfils a gap in  the existing matrix of communication - which at the end of the day is the purpose  of any  language.  Texting begets  greater acceptance  also because it is more in sync with 'an age where the tiny, the concise and the simple are greatly appreciated in communication' , and would , as pointed out by the famous semiotician and essayist Umberto Eco,' evoke certain fears and hope'.

Besides, English, like many other languages, exhibits  differences in its  spoken and written forms. This duality of different types of dialects within the same language,  of the 'High" and the "Low"  or diglossia has a solid social origin and purpose- it exists in Bengali as Shadhubhasha and Chalitbhasha, in Hindi as Shudhhboli and Khariboli and in many other languages. Probably, textese makes English triglossic instead of just diglossic! The  point is that  this is part of a sociolinguistic tradition and one would agree with Crystall when he says that "in texting what we are seeing, in a small way, is language in evolution'.

It stands to reason that no one would like to communicate with a quirkiness that would entail a  risk of not being understood- so it is with the users of SMS. Standard orthography is , therefore, increasingly used when messages are longer.  Change for the sake of change has never been accepted-  the fate of the  international languages  like Volapuk in 1880, Esperanto in 1887, Ogden in 1930s, Anglic in 1930s, and  Seaspeak stand  in eloquent silence.  It is not that all what the textese introduces will survive. SMS cannot successfully introduce a word or a habit  for long if the world doesn't want it- Shakespeare, too, failed with new words like conflux, vastidity and tortive,  and no one gave a second glance to Milton's inquisiturient or to Dickens' vocular. 

Research by Crystal (2008), Baron (2008), Thurlow (2011), Shazia Aziz and others ( 2013) et al  has blown the lid off many surmises built around the impact of SMS on English language. Studies have   revealed a)  that 'the evolution  of 'texts' is essentially associated with a strong grasp of grammar and phonetics ,  b)  youth abbreviate words for texting once they have learned standard spelling,  c)less than 20% of the text messages looked at showed abbreviated forms of any kind - about three per message, d) ) only a very tiny part of the texting community uses a distinctive orthography, e )users are generally aware of the context of the use of SMS and very infrequently use it for formal writings, e) mistakes in formal writing amongst SMS users is very little regarding  use of capital letters and  spellings but much higher in obligatory commas,  quotation marks  and semi- colons. Infact, the last finding appears more to do with the alarming decline in the  quality of instruction on punctuation  in Indian schools and colleges, especially commas, quotation marks  and semi colons . 

Besides, there appears to be an element of subjectivity  around the impact assessment  of SMS  also because it is clubbed and braided  with other strands   of ' deviant  youth activities ' - incessant texting, prurient texting, sexting, cyber stalking, etc., and also because the academic community finds it a convenient to deflect from and mask  its own declining standards of instruction.  The decline in spelling ability owing to a surfeit of spellcheckers and the slump in reading habits in this Digital Age have to be also taken into account. Let us not make SMS a " whipping boy".

Texting  is nothing but " the latest manifestation of the human ability to be linguistically creative and to adapt language to suit the demands of diverse settings".  It just makes the job it is applicated to more efficient.  The English language will surely not decline as a result of it, but will probably be enriched.It is time to build blocks on the strengths of textese and its creative potentials. Haven't T20s and ODIs made Test Cricket more exciting ? Doomsday Prophets and Grammar Nazis, hold back your fire for  'it is better to wait the decisions of time, which are slow and sure, than to take those of synods, which are often hasty and injudicious".