Slang, Txt & Chat Language

Slang, Txt

&

Ch@ Language

That language differs in different geographical locations is a well-known fact, but the phenomenon of chat language has within the last decade grown across borders into a universal style of writing. By abbreviating words we create a new type of language, which does not at first glance seem to be very dependent on grammar. Text-message and chat language exist in various languages around the world, but this paper will focus on chat language and slang deriving from English. Is it the emails or the SMS fault that we today have started talking so informal? Or is it just the fact that we creating a new language with all the slang words that is created almost everyday? We can't blame the younger generation for the language we today speaking. It's not something new. It has actually been used for a long time. Words as dunno, gonna, sorta been used for a century. And the word "coz" been in the Oxford English dictionary since 1828. ( Txtng, Crystal David).

Texting has boomed the past years and people feel more comfortable texting then calling. Naomi S. Baron writes in her survey Language of the Internet that

"Sms was developed in Europe, first appearing in the late 1992. The protocol was developed as part of a multinational European effort known as GSM (Group Spécial Mobile) that was constituted to establish a uniform mobile telephone system for Europe."

This part is very interesting, considering the fact that text-messaging boomed in Europe and not in America, yet the most familiar abbreviations come from English words. The country that most likely would have started this chain reaction of spreading the new language must therefore have been The United Kingdom. Since English is a well-known language, spoken and understood by a large global population, the development of chat and text language could have followed the same patterns as the film-industry. French, German or Italian might not have enough speakers for the rest of the world to adapt to their commercial products, and this may be a reason for why chat or text-messaging in their particular languages have not expanded to any appreciable extent. To understand it more I have made a survey to see the statistics and the most common words. The survey consists of questions sent out on www.facebook.com, since this medium is a global community for people of varying age groups. The targeted group was people between the ages of 15-35 who have English as their mother language. People that had English as their mother tongue were singled out, but the geographical variations of English were not categorized any further. It was chosen not to include different variations of smiley-faces, since this survey will focus on abbreviations that morphed from regular writing. The aim was to find out if there are certain patterns