Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Pamela Fox
LING 301
Ania Lubowicz
May 3, 2005
The rise of blogs, instant messaging, and text messaging has caused a new form of English
spelling to evolve, developed mostly by the teenage population. This new spelling, littered with numbers
and abbreviations, is sending shockwaves through the K-12 teaching population who are beginning to
see the new spellings in their students’ papers and are worried their students may never learn proper
spelling. But many linguists recognize their new lingo as a “linguistic revolution:” the English written
language, notorious for its silent letters and misleading spellings, has been released from its confines
and is rapidly becoming a truer reflection of English pronunciation. Though the “Generation Text”
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doesn’t consciously realize it, their new simpler spellings are similar to the phonetic transcriptions that
linguists perform, and they’re unknowingly developing their own phonetic alphabet of symbols mixing
In writing their text messages or blog entries, the youth writer generally has two goals: 1) to
simplify: minimize the number of letters required to type the word, and 2) to stylize: convey a
(seemingly youthful) personality. In accomplishing those goals, there’s also the requirement that the
newly generated spelling shouldn’t have an ambiguous pronunciation; the reader should always know
exactly what word has been written. If only the two goals existed, then a writer could just simplify by
making up new arbitrarily shorter spellings for English words. The stylizing comes inherently from the
seemingly rebellious new spelling. But the reader has two bodies of knowledge in their head: the
standard spelling surface forms, learnt in K-12 education, and the underlying pronunciations of our
language, learnt as a child. In order for the reader to understand, the writer must use one or both of
those knowledge bases in crafting the new spelling. So in modifying the standard spellings, the writer
has only one option left: relate it to the underlying pronunciations stored in readers’ minds. Their new
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spelling resembles English spelling but replaces silent, redundant, or excessive letters with phonetic
symbols. Because many writers have been going through this process simultaneously in the past five
years on the Internet, they’ve mostly converged to the same spelling shortcuts and without official
documentation, effectively developed their own Internet Quasi-Phonetic Alphabet. Though the original
IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) took an entire dedicated organization and language professors to
create, Generation Text has unknowingly created their own nearly-as-powerful phonetic alphabet
Because of the plethora of sounds in languages, the IPA uses letters from many alphabets
(Greek, Latin, etc) in order to represent each phonetic segment with its own symbol. But Generation
Text only has the standard keyboard to create the IQ-PA phonemes: 26 (lowercase/uppercase) letters, 10
numbers, and punctuation symbols, and the English language is usually said to have at least 41
phonemes. An analysis of a sampling of internet spelling reveals that they have indeed succeeded in
creating phonetic symbols from just the 26 letters with a few numbers thrown in. Admittedly, there are
some phonemes (dʒ as in “judge,” ʒ as in “pleasure”) that the IQ-PA acknowledges no specific symbol
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for and instead relies on English spelling. The chart below compares the IPA to the IQ-PA, showing
both the corresponding phonetic symbol from IQ-PA, if there is one, and the English spelling
possibilities. With this mixed alphabet, either the phonetic symbol can be used to represent the sound, or
the original spelling can be used. While the IQ-PA is lacking some phonetic symbols, as just discussed,
it also adds some new phonetic symbols that encompass multiple phonetic segments in just one symbol.
Oftentimes, these are commonly used phonetic segment combinations. The reasoning for the
development of each of the IQ-PA symbols is the focus of the rest of this paper.
Vow el p hone me s
[ɑː ] father {a} , { ah }
[ɜː] bird -
{U}, { ue }, { uC e} ,
[uː ]
soon, through {oo }, { ew }
{a} , { u} , {a CC },
[ə]
about {uC C}
{a} , { u} , {a CC },
[ə]
winner {uC C}
[aɪ] my {I} , { ie }, { iC e}
[əʊ] no {O} , { oe }, { oC e}
[ʊə] tour -
[ju ː] pupil -
Mul ti -se gm enta l p hone me s (no t r epresen ted by s ingl e p hon eme s in IP A)
[ks ] Tax , k ic ks {x}
[tuː] to {2}
SIMPLIFICATION.
More interesting than the existence of the IQ-PA is the question of how the alphabet developed.
Some of the sounds have multiple phonetic representations in the IQ-PA because they developed from
the context of actual words, and the rules writers followed in creating the symbols differed depending
on the environment. The first rule applied produces the most drastic shortening: the replacement of
multi-segmental sounds by one IQ-PA symbol. At the beginning or as the sole component of a word,
letters of the alphabet can be used to represent the sound they make when pronounced in the alphabet
recitation. For example, {n} represents [ɛn] in #njoy# (“enjoy”), {y} represents [ʍaɪ] in #y# (“why”),
and {u} represents [yuː] in #u# (“you”). In any position of a word (because their pronunciation is
unambiguous), numbers can be used to represent the sound they make when pronounced. For example,
{4} represents [fʊə] in #b4# (‘before”) and {2} represents [tuː] in #d2day# (“today”).
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The next major rule applied is the simplification of vowel and consonant clusters, often
cluttered with redundant or silent letters in English spelling, to just one IQ-PA symbol for that sound.
Consonant clusters often represent just one sound in English and are thus easily and obviously replaced
with an IQ-PA symbol representing that sound. The IPA and IQ-PA symbols for consonants are very
similar, because we have a good grasp on the most prevalent pronunciation of our consonants. To
clarify more, occasionally multiple consonant letters are used to spell one consonantal sound but
usually, a consonant letter (or some combinations, like “th”) only has one pronunciation, or its alternate
pronunciations are understood as exceptions to the rule. There are a few sounds, like the alveopalatal
fricatives, that the IQ-PA has no symbol for because they lack a dominant spelling representation, and
thus those sounds must be represented by the original spelling. Examples of consonant cluster
reductions are the change from “would” to {wud} and “pick” to {pik}. But a cluster like “dg” in
“widget” representing the alveopalatal voiced fricative doesn’t have a correspnding IQ-PA symbol and
thus cannot be simplified. Consonant cluster simplification is a more obvious process than vowel cluster
simplification because the English language already has enough consonant letters to represent the many
consonantal sounds. Compared to languages like Spanish, the English language has many vowel sounds
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(but the same amount of standard vowel letters – a, e, i, o, u), so it’s difficult to create symbols for each
of them, but IQ-PA users have found a way. Tense vowels can be represented by appending an e
immediately after the vowel, or after a single consonant after that vowel, like the {i_C_e} that represents
[aɪ] in #fite# (“fight”), or the {oe} that represents [əʊ] in #noe# (“know”). This “append-e” symbol
developed because of a common occurrence in English to pronounce tense vowels when followed by an
e or a consonant plus e, as in the English words “tote,” “bite”, “mate”, “doe,” and “die.” It is one of
those spelling patterns that are so frequent that it could be adapted into a phonetic representation. An
alternate way to represent tense vowels is by simply capitalizing the vowel, like the {O} in #thO#
(“though”) or the {A} in #dA# (“day”). Coincidentally, the capitalization of tense vowels is a
convention used in some scientific papers as well. The best explanation for disparate groups converging
on the same representation is that tense vowels tend to be longer than lax vowels (explaining why
English K-12 teachers often refer to them as “long vowels”), and capitalizing a vowel seems like a
lengthening. Now with so many phonetic symbols for tense vowels, lax vowels are represented by
phonetic symbols that contrast to those. If the lax vowel is followed by a consonant in the original
spelling, the lax vowel can be represented by duplicating the consonant, resulting in a {VCC} spelling.
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Again, this symbol developed from the English commonality to pronounce short vowels when followed
pronunciation commonality is better seen when contrasting minimal English spelling pairs, like
“matted” vs. “mated” and “rided” vs. “ridded.” And since the tense vowels are represented by adding
an “e” or capitalizing, lax vowels that aren’t followed by a duplicatable consonant can often be
represented by simply using the lowercase version of that vowel. There are a few dipthong vowels that
have such common representations in English spelling that the common representation has become an
IQ-PA symbol, like {oi} as in the [ɔɪ] of #boi# (“boy”) or the {ow} as in the the [aʊ ] of {hows}
(“house”). There are also some sounds with multiple phonetic symbols (besides the general tense/lax
symbols) in IQ-PA, like {oo} as in [uː] of #dood# (“dude”) and {ew} also representing [uː] of #kewl#
(“cool”). So for some sounds, IQ-PA users can pick from up to 3 phonetic symbols. This multiplicity of
symbols helps Generation Text writers accomplish their second goal of stylization without losing clarity.
Many of the processes discussed above as pertaining to consonant cluster and vowel cluster
simplification can also apply to individual consonants and vowels, and can be thought of as a re-
representation of that vowel or consonant. For example, the plural ending –s is pronounced as [z] after
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voiced sounds, so many IQ-PA writers will write {z} at the end of such plural words, like {dogz}, even
though the same number of letters is being used to spell the word. An example of vowel re-
representation is the change of the vowel from “what” to {wut}. After simplifying the consonant cluster
from “wh” to {w}, the writer then changes the “a” to more accurately reflect the sound to a {u}.
In generating a new spelling, there are a few more rules to be followed to ensure clarity of
mental pronunciation. If, while applying the above rules, the new form exactly resembles an already
existing English spelling of another word, something has to change or the reader will confuse it for the
word originally spelled that way. For example, a writer might want to spell “show” as *shoe*, using the
{oe} symbol representing [əʊ]. However, “shoe” is already an English word (pronounced atypically due
to historical changes), so the writer would instead need to pick {O} to represent that sound and spell it
as {shO}. Another way that writers can ensure comprehension is to use either all IQ-PA phonetic
symbols in spelling a word, or only original spelling. This way the reader doesn’t have to switch
between their two knowledge bases, the underlying forms and the original spellings, in reading one
word. For example, if a writer wanted to simplify “enough” into *enouf,* they should also do the
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vowel-cluster simplification into {enuf}. Of course, these rules are subconsciously understood and these
STYLIZATION.
Besides varying the IQ-PA symbol chosen to represent a particular sound as discussed earlier,
most Internet text stylization comes from actually changing first the underlying pronunciation of the
target word, and then subsequently changing the spelling to fit that pronunciation change. The
pronunciation change can vary by teen culture as each of those, in real world conversing, have
developed dialectal differences. A blogger in the hip-hop teen culture spells “today” as {tadai} and
“shit” as [shyte], because of that culture’s tendency to pronounce [eɪ] and [ɪ] as [aɪ] in those words in
real conversation. That blogger also appends an {h} after vowels (like {mah} (“my”)) to emphasize
their extreme lengthening, another characteristic of hip-hop speech. The {h}-appending to signify
lengthening is an intuitive symbol for English speakers because of our onomatopoeic words “ah” and
“oh,” known for their length. A different blogger from the asian anime culture spells “that” as {dat}
and “the” as {da} because of that culture’s pronunciation tendencies. In this case, the pronunciation
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change makes their speech resemble child’s speech because it eliminates complex sounds (fricatives). A
general stylization of most Generation Text writing, in blogs and messages, is the lack of capitalization
I was going to go see the dolphins, except I’m low i wuz gonna go c da dolfinz, xcept im lo on $$
on money.
For all I know, you’re still in school 4 all I noe, ur still in skool.
The quality of that work isn’t high. Da kwalitE of dat work isn’t hi.
(except when used as an IQ-PA phonetic symbol). Since capitalization doesn’t reflect a property of
speech, phonetic transcriptions rarely use them. The use of punctuation varies, but there is significantly
less than in formal writing. Periods and commas are used when necessary to indicate pauses, and
exclamation points and question marks are used to indicate an excited or questioning tone of voice.
Phonetic transcriptions performed by linguists also never use capitalization and rarely punctuation.
In the following examples from real Internet text, the multi-step process of generating the new
As the IQ-PA luckily hasn’t been officially documented by many people (perhaps only myself), it
isn’t restricted to any confines right now and will most likely continue evolving and finding more precise
representations for all of the many sounds of this crazy language we call English. We can then hope to see many
of the bloggers of Generation Text matriculate as linguistics majors once realizing that they’ve been doing
phonetic transcriptions all of their online life. Though the teachers may be frightened, this “linguistic revolution”
should prove to be question-provoking: why do we make fun of bad spellers when our original spelling system is
so counter-to-fact? We’re simply putting down those who can’t memorize arbitrary mappings. Would children or
foreigners learn English better if we used IQ-PA instead of the original spellings? Considering that much of
internet speech resembles children’s spelling “errors,” this seems plausible. The IQ-PA suggests many possibilities
Works Cited
Dunnewind, Stephanie. “’Ge neration Tex t' : T eens' IM lingo evo lving in to a
hybrid
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/text/134673768_immain12.html.
“The International Phonetic Alphabet.” Wikipedia. 1 May 2005. Search term: IPA.