Evaluating teenage texting as a new type of written speech

Natallia Narkevich, the Republic of Belarus, ID LLCE2018-310;        Abstract: The subject/topic. The research is devoted to texting language as a new phenomenon among younger generation. The idea to do the research appeared because texting is understood mainly as a certain decline of spelling and even the fall of writing ability among young people. Thus the aim of the research is to prove that texting is not writing in classical sense, but “fingered speech” when we write the way we talk. To achieve the aim a number of tasks were performed. The author studied authentic messages written by 16-20 years old in English, then highlighted the feature characteristics of texting as a new type of language and made up the list of the most popular words, abbreviations, acronyms and grammatical structures used in texting today. As a result we were able to confirm the hypothesis that if texting is a method of conveying oral communication, then the ways it is achieved can be different from formal spelling and it doesn’t lead to the destruction of literary language, because it is another type of writing. The main methods of the research were: studying literature, selection, classification and summarizing the information, carrying out experiments and analyzing the data to confirm the hypothesis. The conclusion was made that texting is a new type of writing that young people use alongside their ordinary writing skills to convey their oral speech in written form. The practical value of this research lies in the fact that weighted approach to the problem of texting and understanding of its emergent complexity will help people of older generations to avoid offensive remarks about illiteracy of young people.

Key words: texting, spelling, written speech, teenagers