The virtual linguist

First mobile phone for Welsh speakers

The first mobile phone with a Welsh texting vocabulary was launched this week at the Eisteddfod. Around 44,000 Welsh words will be available on the phone. The phone's menus and displays are written in Welsh and predictive texting will be available. More on the story here.

Predictive texting in Welsh is not new, in fact, as this Welsh Language Board page, dated 2007, makes clear - but only in Welsh, unfortunately.

The verb 'to text' in Welsh is tecstio. Mobile phone is ffôn symudol. I got that information from this very useful online dictionary. I could specify 'verb' when I keyed in 'text', so I know I am getting the right word.

Misjudged full stop traps a murderer

The suicide note began "Dear Garry. I am typing this note, because I know that if I were to hand write it and leave it for you, then I know that you wouldn't read it". The use of the full stop after Garry, instead of a comma, which most people would write, convicted Garry of the murder of his wife. Garry was a police inspector and forged the suicide note, using wording he had seen on genuine notes throughout his career, but he failed to spot the misjudged full stop. He went on to kill himself when he was rumbled about 18 months ago, but this story was only in the Daily Mail yesterday.

The Mail article is about forensic linguistics, and expert John Olsson (this is his Forensic Linguistics Institute site). People have particular idiosyncrasies when writing or texting and forensic linguists can say whether a piece of text is likely to have been written by a certain person or not. Their evidence alone won't convict people, but it can support other evidence. In the case above, Garry's wife tended to use lots of commas, dashes and semi-colons in her writing, whereas her husband used short sentences and lots of full stops.

Olssen analysed texts sent from a young woman's mobile phone, purporting to be her own words saying she had run away from home willingly. The texts used the phrase 'ave 2 go', whereas Jenny, the young woman, always wrote 'ave2go' without spaces. Similar abbreviations were found in texts sent from Jenny's phone after her disappearance and her boyfriend's phone. He stood trial for her murder.

Forensic linguists tracked down an American kidnapper from a regional word he used in his ransom note. I blogged on that story here.

Texting helps children's literacy

According to a team from Coventry University, texting can help children's spelling. They concluded that 'the ratio of textisms (text abbreviations) to total words used was positively associated with word reading, vocabulary, and phonological awareness measures'. I have read the paper (in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology, Vol 27, No. 1, March 2009, pp 145-161) and note that the authors say that in order to produce and read abbreviations such as 2nite for tonight, children need to have phonological awareness, and phonological awareness is associated with reading ability. Exposure to the printed word is also associated with reading ability, so texting rather than phoning friends provides that exposure. In particular, poorer readers may benefit more, as they may gain an exposure to the printed word in text messages, whereas they show little interest in books and this 'may increase motivation to engage with written communication without the constraints of school expectations'.

88 children aged from 10-12 took part in the study. They were given ten scenarios eg your friend's dad has got a brand new sports car and you'd love to have a ride in it, and then asked to write a suitable text message. The researchers noted the following features of the text messages:

• shortenings (bro, sis, tues)
• contractions (txt, plz, hmwk)
• omitting g from ing words (goin, swimmin, comin)
• omitting other final letters (hav, wil, couldn)
• omitting apostrophes (cant, wont, dads)
• acronyms (BBC, UK)
• initialisms (ttfn, lol, tb)
• symbols (@, &, :-o)
• letter/number homophones (2moro, l8r)
• misspellings (comming, bolinase, are [instead of our])
• non-conventional spellings (rite, skool, fone)
• accent stylisation (wiv, elp, anuva)

There was no evidence that use of or exposure to misspellings had a detrimental effect on children's ability to learn and use conventional spellings. Other findings included the fact that girls use more textisms than boys. This bears out the findings of previous studies with adults and older teenagers, namely that men often text items of information whereas women and girls often write longer chatty texts including emotional content eg they sign off with a x, and include expressions like omg and CUL8R.

There have been apocryphal stories printed in the tabloids about how children are writing school coursework and exam essays in 'textspeak' but when the researchers questioned the children about this, the pupils found the suggestion ludicrous and were well aware of the difference in the registers and the contexts in which they were appropriate.

Some children in this study were given their first mobile phone at the age of six, and the researchers found some evidence that owning a mobile phone early benefits literacy.

Here's the abstract of the paper, and here's a  summary from the Daily Mail. 

National Braille Week

This week is National Braille Week in honour of Louis Braille, who was born 200 years ago. Louis Braille was totally blind by the age of four after an accident in his father's saddlery workshop. He was sent away to a special school for blind children, who, at the time, were mostly trained in practical skills, such as chair-caning. At the time books for blind people used a system where individual letters were raised from the page, and reading was a very slow and laborious activity.

Louis was only in his early teens when he got the idea for a coded system of raised dots to represent the letters of the alphabet. The idea was suggested to him after a visit to the school by Captain Charles Barbier of Napoleon's army, who demonstrated a system known as Ecriture Nocturne (night writing) used by soldiers to send and receive messages on the battlefield at night. Louis simplified Barbier's system so that just six dots were used. There was much resistance over the following decades to the Braille reading system (no doubt because the influential people of the day were sighted) and it wasn't until 1952 that the French government finally recognised Louis Braille's accomplishments and exhumed his body, reburying him alongside other French national heroes in the Pantheon. Today Braille is used throughout the world, regardless of language.

There are 63 possible combinations of the six dots and these represent all the letters of the alphabet, punctuation marks and commonly occurring clusters of letters. Computers are increasingly becoming able to deal with Braille, eg you can type in ordinary text and it prints off as Braille, or you can have Braille symbols on the keyboard. Braille is not a language in itself, but is a code into which any language can be 'translated'. The website of the RNIB (Royal National Institute for Blind People) gives lots more of information about Braille. 

It's not only blind people who find Braille invaluable. A friend of mine, who teaches at a school for blind children, showed me some of the texts that she and her colleagues had exchanged. I found it hard to understand them because they used different abbreviations from those most people use when texting. For instance, I would type b to mean 'be' and c to stand for 'see', whereas my friend meant 'but' by b and 'can' by c, which are standard Braille abbreviations.

Predictive texting and abbey and cathedral

I wrote a post a few days ago on words which OUP had left out of one of its junior dictionaries. Many of the words were Christianity-related eg abbey, bishop, monastery, nunnery, psalm, pulpit. I have just texted my daughter about meeting tomorrow (Saturday 13th December) for the annual wreath-laying ceremony on Dr Johnson's grave in Westminster Abbey. I wanted to make sure she knew it was Westminster Abbey and not Westminster Cathedral. The dictionary within my mobile phone didn't recognise the words 'abbey' or 'cathedral' from the first three or four letters. After I keyed in 'abb' the phone suggested 'abbs' (I've no idea what that is!) and after 'cath' I was offered 'cathay'.

404 about txt spk

The Post Office has issued a guide to 21st-century tech chat (full report here and BBC article here). Lexicographer and slang specialist Jonathon Green has worked with the Post Office to explain the meanings of abbreviations and acronyms which have recently become popular with internet users and texters. Here are some examples:

404: = clueless, derived from the message '404 Not Found' displayed on the internet to show a website you were searching for can't be located

GOOD job: a secure, well-paid job that allows you to Get Out Of Debt

143: I love you, derived from the number of letters in each of the words

Code 35: broke, derived from the message displayed when your Oyster card (London Underground swipe card) is out of credit

COS: an obese person, derived from 'Customer Of Size', the way airlines refer to passengers likely to take up more than one seat

RAB: a big mistake, as in 'doing a RAB', an acronym from Russell And Brand, the two journalists involved in a recent BBC furore (I covered the scandal here)

Predictive texting

Still on the subject of texting, I feel that whoever compiled the dictionary within my mobile phone lives in a completely different world from me. My phone predicts the likely word after I have keyed in the first three letters. I was due to go on holiday with a friend and texted her about her luggage. After keying in 'lug' the phone suggested Lugo. I googled Lugo and discovered it's a Spanish city or the current president of Paraguay. Now, why would anyone with a phone bought in Britain be more likely to want to say Lugo rather than luggage? I realise that luggage is British English, but even so - how many Americans discuss the Paraguayan president in their texts?

Yesterday I texted a friend to arrange to meet outside a particular art gallery. After I keyed in 'gal' the phone predicted 'gals'. I typed another 'l' and this time the prediction was 'galling'. I continued with an 'e' and this time was presented with 'galled'. (Is galled really a more common word among texters than gallery?) Keying in 'r' led to 'galleried'. Even when I got to the end of my word, the phone hadn't and suggested the word 'gallerying', a word which doesn't even come up much on Google.

Earlier today I wanted to key in 'have' but wrote a 'u' instead of a 'v' by mistake. My phone predicted the complete word 'haugesund', which is a Norwegian city. I can pretty much guarantee that not many of my compatriots are texting about that place.

Text poetry

I have just returned from a weekend in Liverpool where the Institute of Linguists held their annual Members' Day. The keynote speaker was Professor David Crystal and the subject of his talk was texting (he has just published a book Txting: the Gr8 Db8). He referred to the South-African born (but now UK-based) poet Norman Silver, who has written many books for children. These are two of his text or txt poems, taken from David Crystal's article in the January 2008 issue of ELT Journal (the article can also be read on David Crystal's site).

txt commndmnts

1   u shall luv ur mobil fone with all ur hart

2   u & ur fone shall neva b apart

3   u shall nt lust aftr ur neibrs fone nor thiev

4   u shall b prepard @ all times 2 tXt & 2 recv

5   u shall use LOL & othr acronyms in conversatns

6   u shall b zappy with ur ast*r*sks & exc!matns!!

7   u shall abbrevi8 & rite words like theyr sed

8   u shall nt speak 2 sum1 face2face if u cn msg em insted

9   u shall nt shout with capitls XEPT IN DIRE EMERGNCY+

10  u shall nt consult a ninglish dictnry

langwij

langwij

is hi-ly infectious

children

the world ova

catch it

from parence

by word of mouth

the yung

r specially vulnerable

so care

shud b taken how langwij

is spread

symptoms include acute

goo-goo

& the equally serious ga-ga

if NE child

is infected with langwij

give em

3 Tspoons of txt

b4 bedtime

& ½ a tablet of verse

after every meal

Forensic linguistics and text messages

The annual Festival of Science is being held this week in Liverpool and there has been much interest from the media in the research of Dr Tim Grant of the Centre for Forensic Linguistics at Aston University (home page). Dr Grant researches into the language of text messages and said that individuals have their own style when texting - in spelling, grammar and punctuation. He referred to one case where a man was jailed for the murder of an ex-girlfriend even though her body was never found. Text messages that purported to be written by the young woman herself were shown to have stylistic features of the accused.

It is not only text messages which give clues about their writers. Vocabulary in written letters or notes can often give away the gender and the age of the writer. Women are more likely to describe someone as 'really sweet' and young people are unlikely to use phrases such as 'I dare say' or 'I was all agog'. But because there are no standard spellings and grammatical conventions in texting - people tend to make their own rules - the language of texting is more idiosyncratic and easier to link to a particular individual.

Some newspaper headlines today were unequivocal - 'Police identify criminals from texts' in The Independent and 'Forensic breakthrough on text messages' in the FT - but the forensic linguists themselves are more cautious. The more suspects there are, the less reliable are the text screening techniques. In the court case mentioned above, Professor Malcolm Coulthard of Aston University was not unequivocal. He said merely that it was 'highly unlikely' the young woman sent the text messages and, regarding the accused, said 'from a linguistic point of view, what I couldn't say was he sent those text messages. But what I could say was he shared a lot of the same features and was among a small number of possible senders' (report here). A forensic linguist's evidence is most useful when it is used in conjunction with other evidence. 

Something I found particularly interesting about Dr Grant's findings - and it wasn't mentioned much in newspaper reports (it was briefly mentioned at the bottom of the Daily Telegraph article)  - was that when pairs or groups of people text one another frequently, their texting language becomes more similar. Mind you, I can't see my texts resembling my teenage son's - his messages take me ages to figure out!

'Txt-spk' poster in London schools

There's nothing like ungrammatical or misspelt English to get Middle England frothing at the mouth. Today's Mail on Sunday received dozens of responses to its article concerning posters on netiquette and internet safety which have been put up in London schools. Typical readers' reactions were: 'a total waste of time, money and space', 'pathetic', 'laziness' and 'load of rubbish'. The title of the poster was 'Top tips for pupils: safe surfing at home and at school', written in standard English, then there were nine tips, basically saying 'be careful', written in text-speak.

I couldn't understand most of it, either, but then I'm not one of the target audience. Moreover, these tips relate to behaviour in chatrooms and when using the internet, so they are written in the language of chatrooms and the internet. The kids aren't being taught history or English literature using text-speak, nor are they being advised to write their exams or apply for jobs using this form of language. This is an extra resource; it's not replacing text books or standard-English-speaking teachers.