Chatspeak Editorial

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h3110 wat’s ^  wat’s ur name

I’ve often run into this kind of message while chatting online with my friends. We’ve all come to dread it, this horrible mixture of chatspeak and 133t. 133t is a mixture of letters and numbers substituting for letters. It is supposedly ‘elite’ and the name translates into ‘leet’.

Where I come from (Elftown), this sort of langauge is spurned and discouraged. They’re called unliterate and the message is tagged as a ‘one-liner’. We are an online community of writer and encourage our members to use correct grammer and punctuation. I won’t lie, we use abbraviations to. However, we only use them in place of site names and even then rarely.

Unfortunately, we are a rare exception. People all over the world log on to instant messengers and chat boards and slip easily into this type of language. The langauge of the internet is spreading like wildfire.

The worst part of it is, they don’t even think about it. It comes naturally to them. As access to the internet is made easier, people, especially teens, are exposed to this type of language more and more often. They shorten words and blur the lines of grammer while online. This has consequences on their writing and even speech. Sometimes they forget and let the loose easy flow of their writing online into their everyday writing. In some cases, popular phrases like brb and LoL are being used in common conversationb among teens outside the online realms.










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