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The linguistics of instant messaging

BY MATT GETTY

In a recent study of how college students use instant messaging (IM), AU linguistics professor Naomi Baron found something that stunned her. No, she wasn’t horrified by the spelling errors, grammatical mistakes, and casual shorthand for which the popular new form of electronic communication is known. Rather, she was amazed at their absence.

“I was shocked,” she recalls. “The misspellings, the shortcuts . . . they just weren’t there in the way you’d expect.” Out of more than 11,000 words from 2,185 transmissions gathered and analyzed in 2003 with the help of students Lauren Squires ’03, Sara Tench ’02, and Marshall Thompson ’03, Baron found only 171 misspellings, just 31 IM abbreviations, and a mere 90 IM acronyms (such as “lol” for “laughing out loud”).

Surprising as these figures were, what’s even more interesting is the implication Baron teased from them and subsequent research over the next year and a half—namely, that college students aren’t using IM the way most people think. In fact, according to “Instant Messaging by American College Students,” which Baron presented at last Friday’s annual American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting, college students are actually using IM to combine elements of both written and spoken language as they craft a brand new style of discourse.

With IM having swiftly moved from techie novelty to teen fad to office tool over the last decade, Baron, who’d already probed e-mail’s impact on written English in her acclaimed 2000 book Alphabet to Email, decided to examine the linguistics of IM. But she wasn’t just interested in how today’s teenagers use the technology at play. She wanted to understand how tomorrow’s adults might use the technology at work. “I wanted to look at how college students were using IM, because I’m interested in finding out what language in the workplace is likely to look like in the next five to ten years,” she explains.

Far from finding that offices are likely to overflow with emoticons, irregular spelling, and haphazard abbreviations, however, Baron found that college students are using the technology quite differently than their younger counterparts. “Most of the characteristics the press highlights when they talk about IM come from how it’s used by middle school and high school students,” Baron explains. Unlike college students, this age group, which Baron says employs language much like fashion, uses IM less as a communication tool and more to define who’s “in” and who’s “out.” “If you’re a young male and you tie your shoes, you’re saying, ‘I’m a nerd,’” Baron explains. “By the same token, if you’re instant messaging one of your friends and spell out all your words, you’re saying, ‘I’m not cool.’”

Yet for college students, who now use IM rather than e-mail as their primary form of electronic communication with their peers, the medium’s more functional role has driven its content to more closely resemble standard English, as Baron’s study reveals. On the one hand then, the fear that IM is eroding writing standards seems unfounded. But that’s not to say that the technology isn’t influencing how current college students, and potentially, future office mates talk to each other.

Aside from the relative dearth of nonstandard English that Baron and her students found in the transmissions, one of the more curious aspects of the sample was the frequency of “utterance breaks” in which students divided a single thought or sentence into several separate messages. Analyzing where these breaks occurred and processing data from an online IM survey created by psychology PhD student Brian Rabinovitz and sophomore mathematics and computer science student Tim Clem, Baron found an intriguing explanation for these linguistic anomalies—multitasking. The survey and subsequent focus groups revealed students held an IM conversation while participating in multiple activities, including keeping up other IM exchanges, browsing the Internet, or using word processing software. The “utterance chunks,” then, were part of a strategy to hold a listener’s attention on a single exchange within this field of competing activities.

“When we talked to students in focus groups, they said that the idea of engaging in only one IM conversation would just be too weird, because IM was, by its nature, meant to be a background activity,” Baron recalls. “For them then IM is, as one student put it, ‘language under the radar,’ . . . a new discourse that’s very different from face-to-face communication, because here you can turn the volume on a conversation up or down depending on your level of interest.”

While her research indicates that IM may not be the linguistic threat many fear, Baron is curious about how this language “under the radar” might redefine notions of communication and plans to further probe the multitasking aspect of IM in future studies. Additionally, though her findings among college students suggest that IM may not be tarnishing written English, she’s cautious about younger instant messagers who don’t learn traditional writing skills. “There’s nothing wrong with younger students engaging in this kind of language,” she explains. “But if they’re not also learning standard forms of language then there’s a problem.”

Problem or not, as IM continues to develop and grow in popularity, it will no doubt continue to provide Baron with an enticing window into the future of language. “Much of the work you do in linguistics is theoretical or historical,” she explains. “This is language that’s happening all around us, and it’s wonderful just to catch it.”