Assignment # 5 - R U LSNG YR ABLTY 2 US TH ENGLSH LNGG ??

The English language has changed in my many ways over the years, changing accents or pronunciations, but in the last decade or so there has been a newly developed language. Teen-speak as it has been named, is the language developed through use of social networking sites on the internet and the massive amount of texting on cell phones. Naturally humans are always looking to complete a task the easiest and most efficient way, when cell phones came about and internet chat it seemed efficient and easy to drop letters and alter words so you had to type less. It was so simple to understand and many young people were able to connect with each other with relative ease, which made it so popular. Today it is used more than ever and gets debated all the time if it really is diminishing the younger generation’s vocabulary. In 1984, Oceania has the new language “newspeak”, which involves a limited amount of words altered slightly for changes in the use of the word. It is difficult to take the language people have been using for hundreds of years and change it so much. With republishing dictionary’s and common use, the language becomes more popular to the citizens. This closely relates with the subject of teen-speak, except it is not trying to change the original language completely in every use. I like the point that Ben Macintyre makes in his article about how the teen-speak was developed by the young and for the young and it will be welcomed. He asks the question that maybe it is just the way kids have developed their communication in technology to be semi-secret from adults, as kids have always done. Whether or not the teen-speak language is good or bad, it is accepted by many to keep it going for a while. I believe it will keep changing slightly, because of the efficiency it has in communicating between young people using these devices. It is quite interesting I find, that the generations of teenagers and younger people have been able to actually create something that becomes so well-known and used frequently, intelligent some might argue. A language will go through changes and for all we know this could be just a phase that never makes it through. I believe there are enough people in the world interested and using the original English vocabulary/language to ever destroy it completely.