The trends you discuss are rooted, at least in part, in practices that predate cyberspace.

For instance, in my Junior High days in the late fifties early sixties it was not uncommon for girls to “personalize” their names. Most common was the inversion of “i” and “y”. Thus Terry became Terri, Trudy changed to Trudi, Linda morphed into Lynda. etc.

We also see in those days the beginnings of abbreviation slang. Who hasn’t seen a yearbook signed KIT, or a letter marked SWAK. And I think it was during the early seventies, if not earlier, that “tough” metmorphasized into “tuff” as a term of approval and coolness.

The rise of cyberspace certainly accelerated those trends, but in no way originated them.

So, lets jump forward in time.

It’s been most of a generation, probably several generations of teen culture, since the origin of online chat in venues like IRC. I never saw much IRC, because I didn’t like the quick pace or the brevity. I was always more of a usenet guy. But I was aware of the abbrevation conventions, and by the time I discovered Yahoo chat, which I did log onto occasionally, the trend was in full swing, lol. U no?

And the motivation is obvious. Chat is a high paced medium with severe limitation on effective bandwidth. Thus the motivation for adopting ad hoc compression algorithims is obvious.

And there are a couple of other streams leading into this river. One is the “133t” speech of the hacker community. As far as I know, this was motivated by pure desire for coolness. Interestingly, it seems to mark the first large scale entry into the lingustic mods game for young males, which had previously been more of a female domain. Perhaps we are seeing the rise of equal opportunity social insecurity.

And then there’s the rap/hip-hop community. I know almost nothing about that, except that the lingustic mods present there appear to eerily mirror those found online. What is cause, what is effect, and what is convergent evolution I wouldn’t venture to guess.

And, in doing a little googling to write this, I have come across references to gamer slang. I will not pursue that, but it is probably worth taking a look at.

Have fun,
-Steve

Aside: I find your blog hard to read with the tiny font (not a candidate for Lasik myself), but if I increase the font, the comments get cut off on the right side.

I wish all blog software themes were not designed by 20 year olds – when they reach 45 themselves they’ll realize why they never kept any older readers…

We won’t know for a while yet what sort of long-term impact this txt and l33t-style spelling has on current teens’ spelling and grammar as they mature. I know a lot of adults, for example, who can t4lk p3rf3c7ly w2ll 1n l33t, but we all know when l33t is amusing and when it is inappropriate. I’d never write a business email in l33t or txt or any other of the lax spelling/grammatical styles I use on Twitter or IM or IRC, because I want to present a particular facet of myself – my businessperson side.

So the question is, as these teens mature past their early 20s and into that period of life where it becomes important to be able to present a serious and professional side of yourself to those you hope will pay you a living, will they be able to adapt to more formal styles of communication? I suspect that yes, they will, because they’ll have to. If they don’t, then we have a problem because clear and professional communications skills are going to be even more important in the future than they are now, particularly with this increasing trend towards knowledge-based jobs and the collapse (you see it especially in the UK) of the manufacturing sector.

I’d also like to make the point about native languages that aren’t English. I can only discuss my second language, Welsh, but I do know that teens in Welsh are doing the same thing by creating txt abbreviations of common words. Welsh speakers are also making increasing use of the internet as a venue to use and preserve their language, so I actually think the net is a valuable part of the future of native/minority languages rather than inevitably an erosive force.

“Destroyed native tongues”? that’s pretty heavy handed, and if your hope that this is just a natural evolution of English, why can’t it have been evolution in other languages, too?

Then again, there’s also a sense of making a word your own, making it *your* name. I think it might be connected to our obsession with individualism and the wide variances when you look at actual names, where often dozens of spellings co-exist, from Kaitlynne to Antwon.