Parents relax! IM is a linguistic renaissance for kids

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Toronto, May 16: Far from ruining teenagers’ ability to communicate, instant messaging (IM) actually represents “an expansive new linguistic renaissance”, suggests a study, which will provide some comfort to teachers and parents worried over the language skills of youths using online shorthand.

“Instant messaging represents an expansive new linguistic renaissance,” said Sali Tagliamonte and Derek Denis at the University of Toronto, Canada. They argued that in a setting where youngsters risk the disapproval of their elders if they use slang, and the scorn of their friends if they sound too buttoned-up, IM allows them to deploy a “robust mix” of colloquial and formal language.

The study, which is to be published in the spring 2008 issue of American Speech, underlines that far from ruining teenagers’ ability to communicate, IM facilitates youths show off what they can do with language. “IM is interactive discourse among friends that is conducive to informal language,” said Denis, “but at the same time, it is a written interface which tends to be more formal than speech.”

The Canada-based researchers analysed more than a million words of IM communications and a quarter of a million spoken words produced by 72 people aged between 15 and 20. They found that although IM shared some of the patterns used in speech, its vocabulary and grammar tended to be relatively conservative, New Scientist magazine noted.

According to the report, the researchers found that teens do not use abbreviations as much as the stereotype suggests: LOL (laugh out loud), OMG (oh my god), and TTYL (talk to you later) made up just 2.4% of the vocabulary of IM conversations — an “infinitesimally small” proportion.