Cyber English

Before mobile phones took off in the mid-1990s, no one had predicted that they’d create a new means of communication: the text message. In fact, not long before email and text messages came along, some people had said that writing was dying and that in the future, speech would be king. We won’t write letters anymore, we were told. We’ll just make phone calls.

But now, writing is back on top. Every day millions-probably billions-of emails are sent round the world. Why call someone when you can email them? Millions- possibly billions of text messages are sent too. Millions of people are chatting away (but of course they are really typing away) to friends and strangers in internet chat rooms and on messenger services. And they are all communicating using a written form of language.

And if they’re sending text messages and chatting in English, the chances are they are using a new form of the language. One that no one had thought of even twenty-five years ago. It’s got new rules for spelling and grammar. It uses symbols and punctuation in ways that they have never been used before and, in many ways, it’s much closer to speech than to traditional writing. Whether you love it or hate it, one thing is clear. It’s here to stay so you might as well get used to it!