You're listening to Away with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I'm Grant Barrett.

And I'm Martha Barnett.

And no, texting is not destroying the English language.

And if you want proof of that, then you need to run right out and get the wonderful book

Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch. She's a linguist who analyzes the language of

electronic communications, so tweets and texts and the like.

And Grant, I think you'll agree that it's a smart introduction to language and

linguistics in general.

Yes.

And it's rich with insights about language in the digital age.

For example, she points out that it's not that writing has completely changed in the digital

age, but rather it's forked into formal and informal versions.

She writes, the internet didn't create informal writing,

but it did make it more common,

changing some of our previously spoken interactions

into near real-time text exchanges.

And she explains that in the process we've been developing expanded systems of

conveying emotional nuance through text. In other words we've been crowd sourcing ways to make

electronic communication more personal and not less. For example take emoji.

It's not that these cute little symbols always replace words or compete with them

many emoji function like gestures. They accompany speech online much as we naturally gesture when we're talking.

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