Ted Summary and Reflection

TXTING IS KILLING LANGUAGE,JK!!!!

By Jhon McWhorter

Summarized by Najmiatul Fauza

We always hear that texting is a scourge . The idea is that texting spells the decline and fall of any kind of serious literacy or at least writing ability among young people today. The fact is not true, actually texting is a miraculous thing.

Texting is not writing at all. Basically, language has existed for perhaps 150.000 years at least 80.000 years. The language used most in speaking. Writing is something that come along much later, so first there is speech and then writing came along as a kind of artifice. Writing is a conscious process, so when you write you can look backwards but not to talking. Nobody talks like writing. Casual speech is something quite different. Linguist have actually shown that speech is much looser, telegraphic and less reflective very different from writing. For example, in a distant era now it was common when one gave a speech to basically talk like writing. This speech is formal very different to casual speech. 

 If  someone can speak like writing, so logically that she/he can write like they speak. That’s where texting come in and so , texting is very loose in structure, no one thinks about capital letters or punctuation. Texting is finger speech, now we can write the way we talk. This is kind of emergent complexity. In this new kind of language, there is new structure coming up. For instance, there is in texting convention which is LOL. LOL is laughing out loud, but nowadays, LOL doesn’t mean laughing out loud anymore. It is evolved into something that is much subtler. It is a market of empathy, accommodation. Linguists call thing like that pragmatic particles, any spoken language that used by real people has them.

Texting these days is that what we are seeing is a whole new way of writing that young people are developing, which they are using a long side their ordinary writing skills and that means that they are able to do two things: increasing evidence is that being bilingual is cognitively beneficial that also true being bidialectal that’s certainly  true of being bidialectal in term of your writing and so texting is evidence of a balancing act that young people are using today, not consciously of course but it’s an expansion of their linguistic repertoire.

In my opinion, this is a very interesting topic which is explained about the language that has been developing overtime. Nowadays, young people are doing texting like doing speaking without paying much attention to the structure.