why text messages are fascinating ;)

Someday there should be an area of linguistics dedicated to text messages.  Or, there could be a slew of theses about text messaging.  It could be referred to as the time when everyone was studying text messages.  This may be going on already, but I haven't seen a linguistics paper on text messages yet and I'm years away from writing a doctoral thesis.

Anyway, hopefully after reading this post you will never see text messages the same way again.  Here is a list of interesting linguistic things about text messages:

-Different people have different texting styles.  Some always add emoticons (like the one in the title of this post).  Some use perfect standard American English grammar.  Some use a strange grammar that doesn't look like a grammar at all and yet has very methodical rules.*

-Even the people who start out with the perfect standard grammar will usually use more of the texting grammar as time goes on.

-Is there a texting grammar?

-Some people feel the need to open up conversations.  I know at least two people who preface their first text in a conversation with "hey girl" or "hey ladies."  I tend to jump right in.  Is there some kind of pattern to this?  Would people from a particular dialect group prefer one way over another?

-How does one end a conversation in texts?

-When is it inappropriate to call someone vs. text someone?

-"Text" can be a verb.

And this is why text messages are fascinating.

*Linguists define grammar as the set of rules which govern the structure of a language.  It encompasses so much more than what was in the elementary school grammar book.  To fully explain the concept of grammar would take another post.  For the sake of this one, I need to leave you with this concept:  all natural human language is governed by grammar rules.  This means that even something like a rural dialect has structural rules which would be called a grammar.  Therefore it would be interesting to uncover the grammar underlying text messaging when it deviates from the grammar of standard American English.  If anyone would like me to expand on this concept of grammar, please let me know.  I will try to make it less tedious and technical than this explanation.

Pygmalion

I meant to post this weekend, but I found myself in an epic battle with my computer on Saturday over its functionality.  I eventually won, but there was much loss on both sides.

Anyway, as I waited for my computer to run diagnostics and fail to boot yet again, I read all of the play Pygmalion by Bernard Shaw.  For those of you who aren't familiar, it's a play about a professor of phonetics, Higgins, who decides to pass off a lower class Cockney girl, Eliza Doolittle, as a duchess by teaching her how to speak like one.  If this sounds familiar, you may have seen My Fair Lady, the musical based on the original play. It was made into a movie starring Audrey Hepburn as Eliza.

The play was less about linguistics than I thought.  The setup of a phonetics professor teaching a Cockney girl to speak as if she were upper class is a vehicle for a critique of the upper class which Eliza is striving to imitate.  It does, however, highlight the way our language is not always the thing that most defines us.

In a previous post, I talked about the way people subconsciously judge people by the way they speak.  The linguistics community tends to make much of this connection.  While the way we speak is one of the main ways we are judged, it is not always the most important way.  Eliza offers us a counterexample.  Higgins can teach her how to say vowels and consonants like a duchess; he can even tell her which phrases mark her as a member of the lower class.  However, it is Pickering (an expert in Indian dialects and a friend of Higgins) who really teaches Eliza to be a duchess, and she says as much in the final act.  Pickering teaches Eliza self-respect by treating her like a duchess from the first rather than a low class woman.  In the final test, it is that air of self-respect that truly marks Eliza as upper class, not the phonetics lessons.