Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

by Gretchen McCulloch

The linguists Sali Tagliamonte and Derek Denis got seventy-one teenagers to donate the written records of their instant messaging conversations so that they could disentangle what they were actually doing. They found that the teens weren’t actually using internet slang all that much. Unlike examples from hyperbolic articles, where almost every word is replaced with slang (r u gna b on teh interwebz l8r?), only 2.4 percent of the actual teens’ messages were slang. (I’m reminded of the surveys of perception versus reality for other kinds of youth behavior, where everyone thinks everyone else is drinking more and having more sex than them.) What the teens were doing instead was more sophisticated: they intermixed the very informal features, like smiley faces and acronyms, with very formal ones, words like “must” and “shall” that are rare in speech.