Teens Aren’t Breaking Language,

They’re Adding To It

By Ashley Dean
October 30, 2019
From https://www.cpr.org/2019/10/30/teens-arent-breaking-language-theyre-adding-to-it/

Ok.

It’s a simple enough affirmative response to something — or it used to be. But

if one teenager texted that one-word sentence, period included, to another
teenager, it’d be fighting words. 

The OK, period, means you’re mad. The most neutral affirmative response
would be “ok” — and that’s it. There’s also “ok!” “okkkkkk” or “ok…” 

When your social life relies on texting and social media, punctuation is
everything. Add in timing — the modern versions of rules like “wait three days
to call him” — and emoji, which do more work than you might think, and
you’ve got a whole new way of communicating.

And it’s not just a teen thing. While there’s some fear amongst older
generations that Generation Z isn’t really communicating, effective
communication via text is everyone’s problem — and teens might be better at
it.

As Kira Hall, a professor of linguistics at the University of Colorado Boulder,

points out, 96 percent of American adults have cell phones and 81 percent
have smart phones. Cell phone use is ubiquitous.

“It is communication,” she said. “ There’s no going back.”

I’m mad. Period.

The period, in the digital age, has found enormous power. Its presence or
absence completely changes the tone of a text.

“Thanks” vs. “Thanks.”

“No” vs. “No.”

“It’s fine” vs. “It’s fine.”

Hall teaches a class called Language and Digital Media in which she and her
20 undergraduate students explore ways in which people communicate in
texts and online. And in that class, the period is a favorite topic.

No longer a mere signal for the end of a thought, the period carries emotional
weight.

“The default would be no period, so if there is a period, you need to read

meaning into it,” she said. “It comes across as this kind of forward punctuation
mark that must have meaning.”

Clarise, 15, said a period at the end of a text is a cause to “really read into
things.”

“When people punctuate texts — like my dad would be like, ‘OK,’ period.  And
I'm like, ‘Oh my God,’ reading into it,” she said.

In 2013, a New Republic piece sparked a popular discussion about the period

as a passive-aggressive punctuation mark, Hall recalled.

In the story, editor Ben Crair wrote:

"This is an unlikely heel turn in linguistics. In most written language, the period
is a neutral way to mark a pause or complete a thought; but digital
communications are turning it into something more aggressive. 'Not long ago,
my 17-year-old son noted that many of my texts to him seemed excessively
assertive or even harsh, because I routinely used a period at the end,' Mark
Liberman, a professor of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, told me
by email. How and why did the period get so pissed off? It might be feeling
rejected. On text and instant message, punctuation marks have largely been
replaced by the line break."

In 2015, scholars gave sample sentences to 126 undergraduates — texts with

periods and texts without periods — and the students generally thought texts
ending with periods were more insincere. They felt a person who texted “That’s
fine” really meant it and a person who texted “That’s fine.” did not.

Conversely, another study looking at longer text messages regarding

emotional issues found that young people do use periods in those cases —
specifically to indicate sincerity and the emotional weight of the subject, Hall
said.

There’s also the period’s versatile cousin, the ellipsis. Deployed at the end of
a short sentence, it can be nerve-wracking or devastating. “Thanks…” your
teacher or boss might say when you’ve turned in work. “This is good…” he
might say later, unaware that his ellipsis habit is making people worry that
he’s always disappointed. “Ok…” he will say when you tell him that, correctly
using the ellipsis to indicate his skepticism or uncertainty. 

Or maybe, sarcasm.

Don’t you just ~*love*~ sarcasm?

Here’s a sarcastic sentence:

Wow super cool that my bus 10 minutes late it’s great I love it...

There are three elements signaling sarcasm: Ellipses, over-emphasis of how

great it is, and the omission of punctuation for a run-on thought that indicates
a deadpan tone.

Here’s another one:

Just ~*love*~ when I remember a paper two hours before it’s due.
Pretty self-explanatory — and the closest the English language has come to
actually having some kind of punctuation to indicate sarcasm. It’s been
suggested before, but it hasn’t stuck.

One very early and notable attempt at a sarcasm punctuation mark — also
known as an irony mark —was by John Wilkins in 1668. The character he
suggested looked like an upside-down exclamation point. Hall tells his story in
her class. 

“Sarcasm is a really important one, right? Because if you type something

meaning sarcasm and it’s not read meaning that, you could get yourself into a
lot of trouble,” she said.

There were a few other attempts at the irony mark over the centuries. One
was a backward question mark, another was the Greek letter ψ with a dot
below. Both were proposed by French writers — poet Marcel Bernhardt (aka
Alcanter de Brahm) in 1899 and author Hervé Bazin in 1966. 

But in 2019, teens (and the rest of us) have a variety of ways to show
sarcasm. Students in Hall’s class use some of the more relatively subtle
techniques already mentioned, but they also have more overt methods.

“How people represent it online shifts over the generations,” Hall said. “The
main thing they do now — all 20 students in the class — is inspired by a
Spongebob meme, where you capitalize every other letter or you start with
small caps and then you capitalize.”
“They’re also using other things, too — using what a previous generation
might think of as an ellipsis, a dot dot dot,” Hall said. “Other people use, to
show sarcasm, an emoji that has the eyes rolling upwards, or maybe what
looks like an elongation pronunciation, with a repetition of the vowels.”

So, if you really wanted to be clear about your sarcasm, you might go with an
“okkkkkkkk… 🙄”

Emoji as gesture 
Some of the visual cues we lose in digital conversation are, unsurprisingly,
easily replaced by those tiny, emotive pictures we call emoji.

Let’s go back to the example of “ok.” Here are a few ways you might use it in
a text: 

Ok 👍🏼

Ok 😒

Ok 👏🏼

Ok 😘

Ok 🙃
In order, those indicate general agreement, irritated or sarcastic agreement,
enthusiastic agreement, cute or affectionate agreement and — this is
somewhat advanced — not-thrilled-but-smiling-through-it agreement. 

This is how emoji act as gesture, as linguist Gretchen McCulloch puts it.
They’re replacing body language, though not always precisely replicating it. 

Sometimes, too, they’re there for emphasis: 

🗣LIZZO THE GREATEST OF ALL TIME

Or

Your girlfriend is not 👏🏼 your 👏🏼 mom 👏🏼

Or they’re used for a little flourish:

Who’s coming out tonight?? 💃🏼 💃🏼 💃🏼

Or

Happy birthday! 🎉🎈🎂

Most importantly, they are almost never used to actually replace words, as
many people once feared. Emoji sentences are largely a fiction. There was
definitely a moment in which people were trying to make that a thing, but it
didn’t stick.

It all changes so fast, but there’s no reason to

panic.
Moral panic about the way young people communicate in texts and online
started in the early 2000s, Hall said. But what we have and what we’re still
developing isn’t a new language, it’s just our usual language adapted to
modern life.

What sets these changes apart from past evolutions in language is the rate at
which they’re happening, and the fact that that rate is accelerating, thanks to
the number of people contributing — and to the global scale of the change.
“What’s so unique about what’s happening now is it’s broken down so the
whole mass of people are contributing to language change,” as opposed to
just scholars and prominent writers, Hall said. “It’s a participatory contribution.
It’s not from the top down as it was in the past.”

That means that now more than ever, teenagers are driving language change.
It also means that the way teens communicate is more visible to adults — it’s
not just in person and in texts, it’s all over the internet — and its prominence in
our culture creates more waves, more fear.

“I think even now what I see happening is it’s no longer the moral panic,” Hall
said. “It’s more about a fear that our kids aren’t learning literacy, they don’t
know how to use standard language and punctuate and spell. And a fear that
they’re socially backward, that they’re kind of hiding from social life.”

“I think on both accounts the literature really shows something a lot more
complex. Young people are writing now more than ever before,” Hall
continued. “They’re writing all the time. I think they have a really good sense
of what a text message is versus an email you send to you professor versus a
blog post you want to sound intelligent. They know how to code-switch
between formality and informality.”

Jonah, 18, said he texts differently with his adult coworkers.

“If I need to ask someone to cover my shift, it's not like, ‘Hey, yo, cover my
shift please?’” he said.

And with his parents and grandma, too, Jonah uses standard punctuation and
complete sentences — and definitely less slang. It comes naturally to him, as
it does to most teenagers.

Put briefly: They’re fine 😅👍🏼