Teenagers and technology are destroying our beautiful english language

Languages have been around for thousands of years, it is a unique system of communication that is verbal, symbolic, dually patterned and arbitrary to our use which isn’t invented nor handed down as a gift but the incredible ability to learn. Languages allow us to share ideas, knowledge and emotions to other individuals through the use of language. Without it, we would perhaps be not much better off than gorillas and monkeys who we shared a common ancestors. It is part of our essential human nature and it is what make us what we are and who we are.

However, due to the emergence of technology and the way how teenagers use language may affect our beautiful english language but will not destroy our beautiful English language. Social networking has opened up a new way to communicate just like any kind of language. It allows people to keep in touch, getting feedbacks on ideas immediately, share multiple point of views. All these interactions can be done indirectly, enabling people who share the same interests to hangout together, meeting individuals from other countries and learn about their culture.

But when the younger generation of the society are using it, they start to disregard grammar and the riles of language that we have been taught over the years of schooling It is becoming increasingly difficult to read and comprehend what people are trying to say on social networking platform such as “ Facebook” and “ Twitter”. I must admit that when I first started using the internet I abbreviated “ you’re” and “ your” to the letters “ U” and “ R”. I did it because it i thought it would make typing faster which it did, but when I start writing “ ur”, it ended up making me look stupid.

I realized that it really doesn’t make any shortcuts while I was trying to type out the sentence and it certainly didn’t help people understand me easier. In the essay The Lost Art of Writing written by Professor Laccetti, he stated that ” Unfortunately for these students, their bosses will not be ‘lol’ when they read a report that lacks proper punctuation and grammar, has numerous misspellings, various made-up words, and silly acronyms. ” This shows that using internet slangs will not help us in life.

But naturally, the lexicon for any language will evolve over time as common usage changes and as these words settled into other areas of the internet such as forums, blogs and personal web pages , it may enrich a language. For example time saving online abbreviation like “ OMG” and “ LOL” are now officially part of the official English language. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) stated that the addition of several acronyms to it’s dictionary add some interesting trivia behind the origins of these internet associated expression, showing how “ slang can enrich a language and it is part of the unavoidable evolution of a language.

Linguist David Crystal stated “ Their inventions thus display an almost unique combination of the neotenous enjoyment of language-play”(Language and the Internet 2006) shows that DAvid Crystal is of the view that the slang words are very useful for English as they are extend the vocabulary greatly. Short Message Service(SMS) is a text messaging service component of mobile communication systems and it is a rather new medium for language. although it has been around for a decade, but it only really caught on recently and spread like a wildfire.

Just like any social networking it is full of newfangled abbreviation introduced by the young people up to date, maybe because they were trying to construct a new language of obscurity so that adults will not be able to understand what might be inappropriate or on the other hand they just don’t know how o spell and therefore they’re doing it inadvertently which I don’t think that is the case. “ It is the relentless onward march of the texters, the SMS (Short Message Service) vandals who are doing to our language what Genghis Khan did to his neighbors eight hundred years ago. (Linguist John Humphrey 2007).

This shows linguist John Humphrey’s negative view on slangs and abbreviation. He compared this situation with the time when Genghis Kahn was ruling to show mass use of slangs are destroying the language because Genghis Kahn did a lot of nasty things. But actually, I realized when I text people or on the receiving end, I found out that less than 20% of the words that is in the texts are actually abbreviated.

We actually don’t abbreviate words as much as we think we do and it is not just the youngsters are doing this, I have seen many different sort adults including my relatives texting each other using abbreviation. In the exhibition “ Evolving English” held by British Library showed that poets were already doing it in the 19th century and they called it emblematic poetry and we can see that the youngsters in modern society are to be blamed, if we are we must trace back in to history of English and there is nothing newfangled about this.