The etiquette and grammar of text messaging is to be included in the English Language GCSE exam, taken by pupils at the age of 16. Students will apparently be tested on common abbreviations (more on the story here).
I must say that I find that text messages I receive don't have many abbreviations these days -- certainly not as many as when texting first became popular. In fact, I find that I use more abbreviated words eg c u l8er and thx, than the people I correspond with, because I do not use predictive texting. I turned off that facility on my mobile phone as it drove me mad -- it never predicted the words I wanted to write, but always came up with a suggestion that I would never want to say (as I mentioned in this post). Even so, if I type wed, the phone will finish off the word for me and write wednesday, if I type lon it will fill in london.
Predictive texting sometimes makes texts I receive difficult to understand as people tend not to reread what their mobile has written automatically. 'He' keeps coming up instead of 'if', I find, and 'of' instead of 'me'.
It's a shame that they see it as dumbing down. The pupils get so much insight about language by looking at it in these non-standard forms. And the new GCSEs are bringing in much more study of spoken language - a good move in my opinion, again, as it gives opportunities to compare with written language. The article writer seems confused: they're not being asked to study text messages as literature, so they can't use that comparison. I agree with you about predictive texting, though. My daughter's name is Anna and she always comes up as 'bomb' on my mobile. I once wrote a message saying 'On a train to London with bomb' and it caused much amusement ...
Posted by: Fran | November 16, 2009 at 09:55 PM
Thanks, Fran. My daughter's name is Lizzie, and every time I key in liz the mobile finishes the word as lizard. Very frustrating!
The Anna/bomb confusion is called a textonym, and textonyms are creating new slang in English eg That's really book! (because book comes up instead of cool). There are over 60,000 hits on the internet for zonino; that word came about as a result of excited texters writing Woohoo.
You've given me an idea for another blog post. Thanks.
Posted by: Virtual Linguist | November 17, 2009 at 09:46 AM
Well, whenever I type in mum the first option suggested by predictive text is "nun"! And poor Gran gets texts addressed to "Iran"...
Posted by: The daughter | June 02, 2010 at 05:06 PM
Thank you, the daughter. Hope your mum and gran don't get too confused!
Posted by: Virtual Linguist | June 02, 2010 at 06:25 PM
I love this blog. Even though in text messaging we should use the correct spelling and correct grammar. It should be implemented. Why? It didn’t make us dull. It actually helps us to enhance our capabilities in speaking English. Actually it is very useful for us. In fact, on part I didn’t make some text messaging in not on its correct spelling and grammar.
Posted by: casio px130 | February 15, 2011 at 08:11 AM
You cannot be serious, text talk is not a language. It should not be included in the English language, it is about time we got a grip things!
Posted by: Mia | October 31, 2011 at 12:48 PM