English as a Second Language

It seems that in America today, no the world today, English is becoming a second language. Of course, most Americans learn English as children and grow up speaking it. It’s when those children grow up and wander into the world of Technology and the Internet that English is pushed aside for a wild and mysterious language that has few rules and a million exceptions.

What is this language? The most common term for it is chatspeak.

Chatspeak is basically that use of abbreviated words and phrases that has become so common on the internet that it’s seeping into everyday language.

Chatspeak has several loose rules to follow.

1.Use as few letters as possible when writing out anything.
2.Avoid vowels like the plague.
3.Never ever use any punctuation at all. Unless it is an exclamation point or a question mark, in which case you must use at least seventeen in a row.

Chatspeak rarely makes sense, which I suppose could be rule number four. And somehow, the majority of the world is okay with this. Grammar, spelling, and proper sentence structure are meaningless, and I can’t for the life of me figure out why.

Maybe we’re all just too lazy to make that extra keystroke or two to capitalize something, or put in an apostrophe. We just can’t possibly take the time to move our fingers less than an inch in order to type one extra letter into a word.

“Texting is meant to be fast, you don’t have to worry about grammar.”

That was actually said to me by a very educated friend of mine. She blames the fact that I’m a writer and an English-major-to-be for my frustration with her consistently bad grammar and spelling in texts and even on Facebook.

I don’t even think that makes sense. I know plenty of people who aren’t writers and who aren’t English majors who value at least proper spelling.

The fact is that chatspeak is not only an eyesore, it tends to make one seem uneducated. Take a look at this example:

“OMG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I ttly sah tht ttly hawt guy frm clas n h3 sed ima qt n askd m3 0ut tmrrw @ 8!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! OMG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” – 23 “words”

“Oh my goodness! I saw that really hot guy from our class today. He told me that I’m cute and he asked me out for tomorrow at eight! I’m so excited!” – 31 words (and I even added a few words)

Which one sounds more intelligent? And then, which one is easier to look at? I really hope you say the second one.

In the end, the second one was a little bit longer, but not even by that much. Not much time is saved at all by scrunching up your words until they are almost unreadable. I’d also like to point out that one of those words is longer in chatspeak than regular English.

Hawt
Hot

How much time is actually saved by that? None at all.

Then what is really frustrating is when chatspeak seeps into everyday spoken language. I don’t know how many times I heard “OMG” at my high school, or “prolly” or “probly” instead of “Probably”.

I don’t think I’ll ever understand the chatspeak phenomena, but I just wish people were aware of how unintelligent they look and sound when they use it.