The End of Language As We Know It?

“Kids today can’t spell and don’t know how to write a simple sentence. It’s because of all that texting they’re doing—all those newfangled abbreviations, no punctuation. They’ll all end up with rotten brains and broken thumbs, and the language catastrophe will culminate in 2012, when (according to the Mayan calendar) the world will end because no one can remember how to spell ‘you.’”

Many old fogies (and even quite a few of us slightly younger fogies) have made pronouncements of doom just like this. Heck, I opened up the newspaper this morning, went straight to the comics, and found that today’s Speed Bump deals with this very topic. “The end is near!” the language prophet says. Nobody pays attention; they’re all too busy texting, probably sending messages like “u c ths crzy gy” to the BFF standing right next to them.

But is this the end?

According to some recent studies, no. In fact, the rules of chatspeak are more complex than most of us realize, and kids who are proficient in chatspeak are just as proficient in fogeyspeak (that would be ordinary written English). A study published last year in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology found that texting might actually make young people more literate. Similarly, a University of Alberta study found that kids who can spell things like “OMG” and “LOL” can also spell things like “chilblain” and “exponentially.” Granted, “chilblain” and “exponentially” were probably not on the kids’ spelling tests, but a good speller is a good speller.

So maybe we should all relax. Young people’s brains are not rotting at an ever-increasing rate because of chatspeak. Those young people are actually being very clever in their use of language to communicate vital 411 such as “Does he like like me, or does he like like me?” I would have written that question in chatspeak, but I don’t know how. I suppose that makes me a chat-illiterate fogey, which brings up my next point: Young people are communicating via coded messages that people over thirty can’t possibly understand, and they’re developing super-fast, super-strong thumbs. Those of us with weak, fumbling thumbs don’t stand a chance in the chativerse.

Hmm … maybe we shouldn’t relax too much.