As
technology evolves everyday, and new technologies become available, people try
to adapt themselves with those technologies and their limitations, considering
SMS, IM and email communication tools the way we use them and their limitation,
teenagers and youngers started to develop new style while using those tools in
a way which affected the written language.
In SMS
tool, because it limits the number of characters to 160, people started to
create shortcuts by replacing characters with numbers to comply with the
message length, same for email people send emails to friends using slang
language instead of professional and proper language because its faster. The
new communication style is not following any language standards like grammars
and punctuation, although it might appear that new communication style usage is
limited to those tools, but people started to speak it, as in Egypt and Jordan.
I believe
that this new communication style symbols the death of appreciation for written
languages because languages represent the identity of human being; as well they
are the stores of history and knowledge, and shouldn’t be replaced by
contracted text to communicate in a faster way. When someone submits his resume
or sends an email to his manager, he will use proper language and maybe revise
the email more than once to verify that it doesn’t include any grammatical or
spelling mistakes. It applies to contracts and all formal and professional
peace of work, it should be in proper written language. As Hamzah et al. in
2009 argued that in addition to that people judge each other based on the way
they communicate, someone who send a contracted email or text message will be
considered lazy or it might be considered as an insult for the receiver. I
believe it is an insult for the language itself.
What
teenagers and Youngers did In Arabic language is worse than what happened with
the English language, people started using English characters and Arabic
numbers to express their Arabic words in text messages and emails, they claim
its easier to express and faster to send. I believe it all happened because the
education in schools in our countries are based in American and British
systems, Arabic is not taught anymore in the elementary schools and sometimes
its an elective subject. Once I was talking to friend of mine who sends his
daughter to an American school, he is proud that she speaks English fluently
and a little bit of French and has difficulties in reading and writing her name
in Arabic language. This is a major problem for Arabic Muslims, as the holy
book ‘Quran’ is written in Arabic, and it represents our identity.
In
conclusion, Written language should be protected against perils of new
technologies and I believe the death of appreciation will lead to the death of
the language itself.
References:
Baron,N.
and Ling, R. (2007), ‘Text Messaging and IM: Linguistic Comparison of American
College Data’ [Online], Available from:
(Accessed
5 March 2011)
Hamzah,
M., Ghorbani, M. and Abdullah, S. (2009) ‘The impact of electronic
communication technology on written language’, Volume 6, No.11 (Serial
No.60) pp. 75 – 79, [Online], Available
from: http://www.teacher.org.cn/doc/ucedu200911/ucedu20091107.pdf
(Accessed
5 March 2011)
Microsoft,
(2009), ‘Typing Arabic has never been this easy!’ [Online], Available from: http://www.microsoft.com/middleeast/egypt/cmic/maren/ (Accessed 5 March 2011)
Rafi,
M. (2009), ‘SMS Text analysis: Language Gender and Current Practices’ Language
Vitality in South Asia, Aligarh. Department of Linguistics, Aligarh Muslim
University Press, India, pp 393-405.
[Online], Available from: http://www.tesol-france.org/Documents/Colloque07/SMS%20Text%20Analysis%20Language%20Gender%20and%20Current%20Practice%20_1_.pdf (Accessed 5 March 2011)
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