Text messages and language change

Imagine what a Shakespearean era mom would think of the way we speak today. Moms from a couple of hundred years before that would have been appalled at the way Shakespeare spoke. Language is always changing, sometimes slowly, but always inexorably.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that researchers in Canada and Belgium are studying text messages to chart the changing language in that form of communication. I was encouraged to see that the Canadian researchers’ expectations were that their studies would reveal that texters are not illiterate or dumb, but rather creative and innovative. We won’t know until they’ve collected a large enough corpus and studied the data.

See the whole article here.

language change, language policy, linguistics

Language Change, language planning and policy