http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,66671,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_4The Web Not the Death of Language
By Kristen Philipkoski
Feb 23, 2005, 17:03
We love instant messenger for the little pleasures it provides: workday diversions, covert flirting opportunities, parental contact with an easy out.
But communicating using instant messenger, text messaging, even blogging are changing the way humans communicate. The technologies have opened up a whole new field of linguistic studies, and researchers say the impact will be as significant as the advent of the telegraph and telephone.
Traditional linguists fear the internet damages our ability to articulate properly, infusing language with LOLs, dorky emoticons and the gauche sharing of personal information on blogs. But some researchers believe we have entered a new era of expression.
"Resources for the expression of informality in writing have hugely increased -- something not seen in English since the Middle Ages," said David Crystal, an author and linguistics professor at the University of Wales at Bangor. He presented at the American Academy for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Washington, D.C., by recorded DVD when the live feed failed.
At first glance, you might not expect Crystal to get excited about IM utterances. But from behind a long silver beard and coke-bottle glasses, his excitement is clear. The internet is getting more people to write, he said, and that's a great thing.
Some believe the informality of internet-mediated communication is causing the language to deteriorate.
"The prophets of doom emerge every time a new technology influences language, of course -- they gathered when printing was introduced in the 15th century," Crystal said.But linguists should be "exulting," he said, in the ability the internet gives us to "explore the power of the written language in a creative way."
During a seminar on language and the internet at the AAAS meeting Friday, researchers presented their findings on internet communication techniques.
In the spring of 2003, Naomi Baron collected 23 instant message conversations from college students: nine between males, nine between females and five between males and females. She studied 2,185 total transmissions.
The results did not fit typical stereotypes, she found. They used few abbreviations, acronyms and emoticons, the spelling was reasonably good and contractions were not ubiquitous. Overall, the study suggested that conversing through instant messenger resembled speaking more than writing.
Had the study focused on high school students, the results likely would have been very different. For high school students, IMing is more like fashion. See Microsoft's latest cheat sheet for parents. But high school students are difficult to study because researches need informed consent from parents, who usually want to see the results.
The easier-to-study college students gave a more staid impression of IM communication. The average length per transmission was 5.4 words; 22 percent were a single word. Many were parts of sentences -- 112 included a conjunction, like this: "she's a phd student (break) and my TA," and 48 used a preposition, like this: "what are you bringing (break) on Saturday."
The college students used only 31 abbreviations specific to internet communication, 16 of which were "k" for OK. They used just 90 acronyms total, 76 of which were "lol," and they used just 49 emoticons, mostly smiley faces. Just 171 words were misspelled, and the students often corrected the spelling in a follow-up. When they could have used contractions they did so only 65.3 percent of the time.
Men were much more likely to use contractions, Baron found. She also noted that women took significantly longer to close IM conversations than males, and males were significantly more likely than females to break utterances into multiple IM transmissions.
Probably least surprising was the fact that 70 percent of college students who answered a questionnaire as part of the study said they were simultaneously pursuing other activities while they IM'd, such as listening to a media player, word processing, talking to someone in person, eating or drinking, watching television or talking on the telephone. The average number of IM conversations per student at one time was about three, the highest number being 12.
They had multiple conversations, they said, because of time constraints, and also because focusing on just one IM conversation would be "too weird."
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