by: Samir K. Dash
The growing technology has become both a challenge and solution in the field of communication through language. I say this because, recent developments in the field of IT and telecom has brought a change that was never thought of by the guardians of the English language of the past. The focusing point here is that the use of internet, chat, e-mails and mobile SMS and MMS has brought us to a new dimension of communication which I would prefer to term as "cyber effect" in communication. Well, such a revolutionized concept of communication forced us to witness the disintegration of English expressions both in speech and writings. And this has made it difficult to arrange all expressions in one platform. But as this helped to globalize the language more effectively, it also brought with it wider scopes and possibility to exploit it up to its last stretchable limits.
Chat/ SMS languages versus English
Mobile in India is no more an asset of luxury now, as it was few years back. And hence the present generation (most of whom are youths) are more readily available to use expressions as the following:
"Tnks 4 ur invtn. Un42n8ly i cnt com2 ur hmm@10."
(Thanks for your invitation. Unfortunately I can't come to your home at 10 o'clock.)
And this shows that communication is certainly not a matter of longer words, rather it is the matter of how shortly you express the long. Abbreviated words like Satday (for Satur day) are accepted now a days both in written and speech.To this there are words of modern abbreviations like OIC (oh I see). And the SMS era has its own formulae to short out words. One of such is that "drop out the vowels first" and this means "Thanks" will change to "Thnks".
Another point to note here is that in such language, the priority has been given to the speech, more than the writing form of English. That's why any written expression that has a fix sound pattern can replace others with a similar sound pattern in any word. And that's why "un42n8ly" becomes the new image of the word "unfortunately"
To this you add smileys, emoticons and you get a wide range of expressions with less words.
The community decides the language, and hence the language is bound to evolve a change. English has grown due to the fact that IT and computer revolutions find English more suitable (as well as flexible ) than any other languages. And in addition to that English is now being localized. And this means this Cyber-English will certainly be a part of other localized ones like Hinglish, Chinglish and Banglish.