Many English-speaking people take shortcuts in spelling and grammar when texting. And a lot of initialisms have been popularized via texting.
And some of these shortcuts have begun leaking into the mainstream language as we see in some Dope posts.
Compared to English, Spanish uses a lot more helper words and generally takes more syllables to convey the same meaning. In software development the rule of thumb is that grammatically proper Spanish text takes 40% more screen real estate than the corresponding English text.
That would imply to me that there’s an even stronger incentive on the part of Spanish-speaking text users to shorten & simplify their writing. Like my leaving the “en” out of my thread title, or substituting a “n” for the correct “ñ”.
My question / call for opinions is to what degree people do see shortening & simplifying in Spanish-language texting & are they seeing it leak into the mainstream language? Is the effect larger or smaller than it is in English?
As an aside, I’ve always thought that the detailed declensions & case endings in Spanish are overdue to fade from use as they almost entirely have done in English. So I’m half expecting txtspeak to be the impetus that really gets that change moving.
Is my expectation borne out by the facts we see so far? To be sure it’ll be the work of decades to make widespread changes in “proper” textbook grammar. But if we see many / most young people speaking / writing with many less fluff syllables it’s only a matter of time before their generation is writing the textbooks.
My experience has been that they are not really much into shortening things. For example, I met a guy in southern Mexico who was introduced as “Francisco Humberto”. I asked “And what do they call you?” He looked puzzled and replied “Francisco Humberto”.
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As an aside, I’ve always thought that the detailed declensions & case endings in Spanish are overdue to fade from use as they almost entirely have done in English. So I’m half expecting txtspeak to be the impetus that really gets that change moving.
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I doubt it’s likely for verb forms, because the loss of those forms in English means we often need additional words such as pronouns to indicate meaning. In Spanish, the verb form often uniquely indicates person, so that subject pronouns can be dispensed with. English also requires helper words such as will, should, or could to indicate future, subjunctive, or conditional senses that only require a simple verb in Spanish. Having so many verb forms may be confusing for those who do not use them, but they actually require fewer words than not having them.
Not in my experience. Names are very often shortened, and at least in some dialects other words drop syllables. “Para” for example is often just “pa’.”
As for the OP, I’d say probably just about every language has some kind of abbreviation in its vernacular–it just might not be where you’re looking. In my experience, when people say, “Such-and-such language does this and I think it’s unique,” it’s not really the case. When it comes to fundamental functions (such as brevity, etc.), other languages do the same thing, just in different ways.
If “leaking to mainstream” you mean in publications and such, hell no, unless it is a short story/novel where the type of writing is part of the narrative.
Spanish abbreviations during texting do occur, and I use them. But not for verbs. As Colibrí mentions, with a single verb form I don’t have to add any subject pronouns or any helping verb or any detail even about time or frequency (in some cases). So they do give more detail and are the most important part of the sentence. I rarely see them abbreviated because they give so much meaning. Shortening of pronouns, conjunctions, prepositions, proper use of commas, lack of silent h, and dropping syllables are some of the things seen. Accents depend on how fast the reply is and the autocorrect features, and the ñ is usually added because it can alter the meaning significantly.
Also, the textbooks have to agree with the Academias, the 20-ish or so groups that decide about things like proper grammar and accepted vocabulary. They’ve actually done some simplifications to the grammar rules in the past few years, and even added some new words to the dictionary, to reflect what was already being said. It is not impossible for things to change, but the changes you describe are fairly outlandish.
I’d expect shortening in any non-pictographic language; I certainly didn’t mean to imply that I thought English is, or ought to be, unique in that. The differences between languages would be in what got shortened and by how much.
Notably in the difference between feliz año nuevo (Happy New Year) and feliz ano nuevo (happy new anus). I wish I had a convenient way to enter the ñ in my email program. Some people get around it by spelling año as anio (which sounds the same).
It depends a lot on the people involved. One of my brothers used to use a lot of semesero, but the one time I sent him a message which was completely correct except for an abbreviation of que as q, he had to write back asking “what is that q?” After a few instances of that with other “completist” friends, and of other people sending him messages as incomprehensible as his own, he’s now joined the ranks of People Who Spell (but who will occasionally write q for que or an airport code for a city). A form of abbreviation which is pretty common is leaving out all or part of the vowels.
Many people use “I’m in a chat/on the phone/in a game” as an excuse for lousy or “anarkist” spelling. Those of us who generally stick to the official versions have fun pointing out those places where their version is longer than the normal one, such as writing lla for ya.
As for moving into other media: I’ve had several instances where I or another coworker returned a document with a big red note saying “bring it back in Spanish, this isn’t internet.” One time I had to explain to my junior the exact meaning of XOXOX: she thought it was equivalent to “regards” and was using it to sign off messages to our client.
For que, qué or quien. It’s right there in the word and, as KarlGrenze says, k is ka; the q for que abbreviation is a lot older than cellphones, you can find it in books dating from as far back as the 15th century. Q for que is simply one of the most common examples of removing the vowels.
As T9 goes the way of the dodo and smart phones’ predictive word completion improves, I think we’re all going to see reduced incentive for radical shortening.
I wish I had a convenient way to enter the ñ in my email program. Some people get around it by spelling año as anio (which sounds the same).