The Impact of Text Messaging on Standard English

Many people claim that text messaging is ruining Standard English, and that there will be a decline in literacy because of this new phenomenon with all its abbreviations and deviant spellings. My hypothesis 1 was that students do not keep the language of text messaging separate from Standard English, and that they bring abbreviations and incomplete sentences into their school work. Hypothesis 2 was that students do not know the old and standard abbreviations and that they offer new interpretations of these. Hypothesis 3 was that there is considerable variation in the interpretation of abbreviations that are frequently used in text messaging. I analysed over one hundrer essays from high school students in order to test hypothesis 1, and handed out a questionnaire in order to test hypotheses 2 and 3. All of my hypotheses were corroborated, which means that the text messaging phenomenon is something worth studying in the future