Many words have been bandied around about the “dumbing down” of our culture when people speek lik thiz u no?
Has anybody done any formal studies of this phenomena? I remember linguists being quite surprised to find that ebonics had a fully consistent syntax and was at least as eloquent as standard english. Is it the same case of AOLspeak?
No idea about formal studies, but my gut feeling is that it is in fact a dumbed down language. Although I personally can’t abide it, this is still not necessarily a criticism if you consider how this language came about.
AOLspeak has an interest in being simplified, if only because it is a text-based phenomenon (SMS telephony has taken this to extremes). So ‘ur’, for example, can mean “you are”, but also “your” (classic 1984 Newspeak economy of usage). Now, it’s hasn’t evolved this way completely because of the desire to economise on keystrokes ( I can assure you that things like “thanx” were around decades ago simply for their coolness quotient), but it is the prime driving force.
Now take ebonics on the other hand. This, like cockney slang, has a completely opposite paradigm. Whilst AOLspeak is interested in economy of use, ebonics comes from a disadvantaged urban demographic in which time is not at a premium. Rather, given unemployment and the lack of educational opportunities, there is rather too much of it. This is definitely going to encourage a rich and colourful vernacular. Playing with words is not an expensive pastime.
Short answer, Yes with a ‘maybe’; Long answer, No with a ‘but’.
Just with any language you’ll get use to it. Playing alot of online games, it took me a long time to understand and figure out all the words. But it was merely a matter of convience. Hence the shorter condense words, ur, h8, gg, etc… Plus when your trying to type as fast as you can words start to get muddle, teh, pr0n, liek, etc… Words that people commonly mispell when under duress kinda thing.
I don’t believe necessarily that its “dumbing down”. It’s just condensed :).
Is it dumbed down? Not particularly. AOLspeak essentially requires that one learns an entirely new style of sentence structure, not to mention vocabulary. As TheLoadedDog pointed out, numerous contractions may represent more than one actual word, and it takes some degree of intelligence to digest the speaker’s intent from context. Netspeak doesn’t have a consistent syntax like Ebonics either. There are plenty of conventions, but when half of everything you say is a typo, you can hardly expect logical word order.
Is it really a language? Hardly. Language is used to express ideas. Complex philosphical debate is not likely to take place in “Teen Chat 13” or whatever, and I defy anyone to show me an original thought expressed in netspeak. Anytime you wanted to discuss, say, neuroscience, you’d have to revert to English. With a real language, you could just borrow words, as many languages do from English- eg. a Hindi speaker would normally borrow the English term “telephone”, even when speaking Hindi.
I just wanted to mention that I found this sentence-
It has been my observation that everything is harder to understand for people who are conversant with AOLspeak.
I’ve never head this before and would like to read more about that - do you have any links?
See! I blame Everquest. I suck at spelling and even worse when it comes to sentence structure.
Uh, Stephen Pinker mentioned it in the Language Instinct. You would have to hunt up a cite from there.
What is AOL Speak? You haven’t defined this, and there are many forms of jargon online.
I consider AOL speak to be things like ‘a/s/l,’ ‘lol,’ ‘gtg’-- these are the things that are common on messaging clients.
j33tsp33|< is 3||71R3L’/ different.
Then there’s gaming abbreviation, which has already been mentioned.
I’d think with most abbreviations, it’s just peoples’ limited typing ability that would encourage their use.
Thanks.
Khadaji, I don’t want to bother coming up with links because, as a former student of linguistics, trying to explain to people that “no, the black people aren’t talking wrong” makes me a little peeved. Black English is every bit as valid as every other variety of English. You could probably get a good start by googling “African American Vernacular English” or “Black Vernacular English” - AAVE (and less often, BVE) being the most common terms for it to my knowledge. (Shalmanese is sorta wrong, though - no linguist would have been surprised at this. If AAVE hadn’t had a consistent grammar and syntax, it would have been the only dialect in the world that didn’t. And this was very, very common knowledge, at least among academics, long before Stephen Pinker.)
AAVE is just a distinct variety of English, spoken by Black Americans population. Irish people also speak a dialect of English with words and pronunciations that are sometimes unfamiliar to the rest of us, and even grammatical constructions that are unique to Irish English. Every language has dialects. There’s a lot of vague ideas linking particular grammatical features of AAVE (the habitual be, the dropping of copulatives, various aspects of its sound system) to West African languages, but I don’t think there’s enough historical data for that to ever be anything but pure speculation.
But yes, the unique features of its grammar are consistent - for example, the aforementioned habitual be. “Be” is used to replace “is” in some sentences if it’s describing a habitual or repeated action. I can’t dig up a cite right now, but I’ve read about a study. Two groups of kindergarten-age students, one group white and one black, were shown pictures of characters from Sesame Street. One depicted Elmo (an obnoxious red puppet, for those unfamiliar with the show) eating cookies, and the other was a simple portrait of Cookie Monster (who, on the show, eats cookies constantly.) When asked “Who is eating cookies?” both groups of children answered that Elmo was. When asked “Who be eating cookies?” the white children again replied that it was Elmo, while the black children replied that it was Cookie Monster, since he habitually eats cookies.
So AAVE clearly expresses a grammatical distinction that is missing in Standard English - in this one particular area, it’s actually more sophisticated. (In the end, of course, all real languages are capable of expressing any thought; you can’t really describe one language as generally “primitive” and one language as generally “sophisticated”.)
There is also research that discusses when exactly “is” may be dropped from a sentence. The rules are pretty complex, but when I read them, they seemed to describe usage pretty accurately according to my own experience.
You’re falling into a common trap of assuming that one dialect of a language is “correct” and the others are somehow deficient. But every language has dialects that have unique sounds and grammar - for instance, the Spanish spoken in Latin America lacks the “th” sound that the Spanish of Spain has, and instead merges it with the “s” sound. From the outside, I don’t think any English speaker would dream of considering one group wrong, but we internalize what we’re taught in Elementary School to the point that we believe that people who talk a certain way are simply talking wrong, dammit!
Which, of course they’re not. But we think that speaking a certain way signifies a lack of education, or simply being to “lazy” to speak correctly, because we’re taught from when we’re young that “ain’t is not a word!” and elementary school teachers rap our knuckles for not pronouncing both Rs in “February”. The standard dialect of any language is really just the one spoken by the historically wealthier class, because it naturally becomes the dialect used in education, and the lower classes often gain advantage if they learn to speak it.
It’s interesting, though, how many black people are conversant in both AAVE and Standard English, to the point where they instantly switch between them depending on who they’re talking to. I had a boss once who sounded pretty damn white when he spoke to white customers, but could turn around and sound completely different talking to a black customer. I’m sure most black people in the US are fluent in both, which is an interesting thing to ponder for any monolingual white people out there.
(If you really are surprised at the idea of Black English being a real, full-fledged dialect with its own rules, though, you ought to start learning more. There’s not exactly a shortage of authors who have written in it - Toni Morrison springs immediately to mind, even if most of her writing is in a historical form of the dialect. And you can pretty easily find music in AAVE. Around here, during the middle of the night, when I’m trying to sleep, it’s extremely easy to find such music.)
Well, no, pidgins are gramatically deficient. I wasn’t so much saying that black english in particular surprised linguists so much as the idea that theres no natural, evolutionary tree of languages with english up the top and primitive languages down the bottom. For example, the idea of dialects in sign language and the like is still a relatively recent one which was unsuspected.
But would pidgins be considered dialects? I mean, pidgins are spoken only as a secondary language - no one is a native speaker of any pidgin. And in those rare cases where children have been brought up on pidgins, they’ve quickly added syntax complexities that the pidgins lack, and at that point, it’s no longer a pidgin.
Right, pidgins become creoles once they have a decent number of native speakers. Creoles are full-fledged languages, but pidgins aren’t - they don’t have the capacity to express every thought, just the ones necessary in the context they’re used. They are often used for trade between people who don’t speak the same language, and probably never used for discussions of philosophy. 
I’m not familiar enough with how contact languages have been studied to know when particular leaps of understanding occured, and Shalmanese is right, of course, that pidgins do have simple grammar and few words - they wouldn’t work if they were as hard to learn as people’s native languages.
But AAVE isn’t a pidgin; there’s some thought that it grew out of a pidgin English used between slaves from different parts of Africa, but I don’t think that’s universally agreed-upon. Nowadays, anyway, it’s far too much like English to be considered anything but a dialect - if it had become a creole in its own right, it wouldn’t be mutually intelligible with English.
Whoa there sparky! Back it up. I have not fallen into any trap. If an assumption was made, it was by you. I expressed an interest in reading more about a statement. Note the following quote is the full text of my post:
As for the last part of your message
Well, asking about where I can read more is consistent with wanting to LEARN more. I did not challange the varacity of the statement, I asked for information on links where I could read more. If you have a problem with that, it is your own. I was simply looking for information.
The name you want is William Labov. His research in Black Vernacular English in the late 1960s was what truly broke new ground.
In the article linked, skip down to section 2, then proceed from there.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to come across as snippy as I obviously did. It was late at night, what can I say? I overreacted little to your statement that you’d never heard it before; it came across to me as shock at the notion that AAVE was really a full, consistent dialect. Obviously you weren’t shocked. This is an argument that I’ve had quite a few times with various people. I didn’t mean to project onto you.
Fair enough. And for my part, I apologize for calling you Sparky… besides, I have no idea what I meant by that anyway…
I did a paper on this for my linguistics class a couple of quarters ago. I’m not at home at the moment, but when I get back I’ll post a link to it.