The kids are all right.

I’ve seen a lot of handwringing about how young people don’t talk prop’ly these days, and it’s all the fault of SMS and the Internet.

From a linguistic perspective, this is silly. Language is always changing. Our ‘proper’ English would have hurt Shakespeare’s ears, and his English, in turn, would have pained Chaucer. And so on. I’m sure that Old English folk must have grumbled as they saw their beloved case system slipping away. “Bloody foreigners!” they would have said. “Coming in here with their arsy relexification!”

Parents worry about the negative influence of email and IM on language. But they don’t seem to have considered that kids are writing to each other! Has any generation in history corresponded by writing this much? All our parents ever did was talk on the phone.

Link:

Researchers at the University of Toronto found that more than three-quarters of Canadian teens use IM on a regular basis, but that the writing is surprisingly sophisticated. Though they often use informal diction and bizarre acronyms, the research found that students also use more formal phrasing than expected, and turn out to be talented at switching between different registers. “Everybody thinks kids are ruining their language by using instant messaging,” says Sali Tagliamonte, one of the study’s authors, “but these teens’ messaging shows them expressing themselves flexibly through all registers. They actually show an extremely lucid command of the language. We shouldn’t worry.”

Indeed.