‘il b kmg dar 2 mor 2c S cz I...’

~ This is no gibberish but the language of SMS, that’s breaking all known rules.....

“It’s almost impossible to understand!” says Dr. Dushyanthi Mendis. We are leaning over a mobile phone, struggling through a thicket of acronyms; a virtual forest of abbreviations – and just barely getting somewhere. Perhaps it’s the complete lack of punctuation, perhaps it’s the fact that the letters have been whittled down to the bare minimum, if even that; I however, have the sinking suspicion that it’s because this is an alien language.

Take this SMS: ‘il b kmg dar 2 mor 2 c S cz I need 2 giv her dr buk kmg wif P vl meet 2 k g’n8.’ Translated it could read: ‘I’ll be coming there tomorrow to see S, because I need to give her the book. Coming with P. We’ll meet too ok? Good night.’ Of course messages aren’t always as troublesome as this – often there are whole words. Especially with the advent of the predictive text in cell phones, it’s actually easier and faster to spell your words correctly. What’s really surprising, however, is the number of people who could actually comprehend that first cryptic message – there are enough of them to make this something of a social revolution, says Dr. Mendis, who is a senior lecturer in English at the University of Colombo.

In the past few years, Dr. Mendis and her students have watched the evolution of SMS discourse with interest. Not least because the vocabulary used in SMS and online chatting is unusual in that it cannot really be called writing or speech – instead a mix of the two. “Traditionally we’ve had two media or two registers - writing and speech,” says Dr. Mendis, “now with the advent of the internet these distinctions have become blurred. You’re sitting there typing, and this typing shows up as writing, but what it actually is, is your speech.”

Having authored the paper, “Situating SMS (Short Message Service) Discourse,” Dr. Mendis’ research reveals that there is some order in all the chaos. Though some of these messages flout conventions of spelling, punctuation and grammar, she says that with a little effort SMS abbreviations are often decipherable. “Some are simply abbreviations that use the first letter of each word, like tc (take care) or gn (goodnight). My students tell me that mtgbu (may the Triple Gem bless you) is also used,” she says adding that “other abbreviations show features of phonetic spelling - often with combinations of alphanumeric characters - that is, 2day or any1, redundant letters are dropped, as in letr (letter). Vowels and consonants are left out as in cmb (Colombo).” However, not all abbreviations are ready to bare all at first glance. Context in such cases is everything. “For example, the letter ‘l’ is used (I’m told) for “will” as in “He l” or “She l”. “Pl” is used for ‘please,’ she explains.

“The primary purpose of a text is to convey a message, therefore the grammar and the spelling are secondary,” points out Heshan Dharmawardhana, an undergraduate student at Delhi University who has done some research into the field. Gayani Ranasinghe, another undergraduate student at Colombo University, spent six weeks collecting data for her paper on SMS discourse. She found a couple of unexpected abbreviations – ‘Budds’ for ‘Buddhu Saranai,’ ‘M.A’ for ‘Maasha Allah,’ (meaning Thanks to God) and ‘Frentho,’ an abbreviation for ‘Dear friend’.

Even more interesting were the endless variants possible on several common words. The word ‘good night’ was spelled in several different ways including ‘gnt’, ‘good nyt’, ‘gud nait’, ‘gd ngt’, ‘g’n8’, ‘gudnit’, ‘gudnyt’ and simplest of them all – ‘gn’. Apparently, it is common for a circle of friends to develop their own vocabularies, and in-jokes, and predictably any outsider will have a tough time ‘translating’ such a message.

How people choose to spell their words is about more than convenience, it’s a legitimate form of self expression, says Gayani. “It’s a big fad among young people…it’s almost as if they’re saying, “I created it, this is my baby”…a lot of individuality has gone into creating that text.” It’s also no surprise that the creators themselves tend to be heavily influenced by local slang, and pop culture. Not only is it common to type entire messages in Sinhala using the English alphabet, words like ‘aney,’ ‘aiyo’ and ‘machang’ pepper texts along with entire lines from popular Bollywood movie songs. “It depends on your cultural schema, if you don’t have it, you don’t have it and there’s no way you can figure it out,” says Gayani, “except if you ask someone, and that’s what I had to do.”

As the base of internet and mobile phone users expands to include younger people, educators are finding that the Queen’s English is increasingly coming under attack. Priyanthi De Silva, who teaches A/L English reveals that students are learning abbreviations first and correct spellings later – resulting in more misspelled words in critical exams or homework assignments. I don’t have a problem with it though,” she says, adding “as long as it is confined to situations in which it is appropriate.”

Try as one might, and however inappropriate it may be, the language is refusing to be disciplined. It is apparent that it is not only evolving on a larger scale, it is also doing so rather quickly – thanks in most part to the surge in popular technology like cell phones. Emphasizing the investment people make in such technologies, Tony Mahadevan says, “I think a mobile for instance is actually an extension of yourself.” Tony is the CEO of C3 Labs, a Sri Lankan company that is currently working on creating content such as wall papers and MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) messages for mobile phones.

Companies like this tap into one of the major drawbacks that communicating through texting and chat produces – their smiley faces, angry faces, sleepy faces; their graphic yawns, bunches of flowers, ice cubes and fists are helping users communicate emotion. “Sometimes when you’re reading a chat it’s hard to figure out whether someone is joking,” says Dr. Mendis. Emoticons and MMS messages not only leave little doubt, they also offer new and innovative ways of expressing oneself. Even these are localized, says Tony, explaining that C3 Labs are currently working on MMS messages that use famous Sri Lankan folk figures like Mahadana Mutta.

Numerous globally recognized coinages – famously acronyms like LOL and TTYL - have their origins in internet chat rooms. SMS (pre-predictive text) and the early Internet had one thing in common: they were hard going, says blogger and amateur linguist Rahul (name changed to protect privacy). “SMS is hard because phones are difficult to type in, so you opt for the shorter word. You often have character limits, so opt for the shortened form. You are probably paying per SMS - shorten it some more. Similarly, in the days of the early Internet bulletin boards, people might have been chatting on a 300 baud line and paying for every minute of the dial-up phone call. Necessity became the mother of abbreviation. When the net got faster and when phone-makers introduced predictive text - both got cheaper, things changed.”

For Rahul and other bloggers like him, there is only the most tenuous basis for comparison between the two mediums. “The Internet is a vast, many-dimensional place, SMS is a flat comms medium,” he says, adding, “the Internet has history and culture -indeed, it spawns subcultures by the dozen. Obviously, language as used “on the Internet is far more complicated by many orders of magnitude.” And he has a point. One need only browse through the number of vocabularies specific to different sites on the net. “These vocabularies may be mild and generic (e.g., Facebook's “poking” and “friending”) or ancient and hallowed like Usenet's “killfiles” and “bang paths” or just plain weird, like IRC and slapped-with-a-trout jokes,” explains Rahul.

One of the few things they do have in common is an almost constant innovation. Not only are new words, abbreviations and acronyms being created by the minute, we’re also looking at the meaning of words and phrases changing inexorably over time. “This is how languages work, and evolve,” says Dr. Mendis, “words are formed, or coined, for a specific use, which then gets expanded, when someone uses them for another meaning.”

What is doubtful it seems is whether these coinages will ever make it into the mainstream. In the past, many words from popular slang have barely outlasted the adolescence of a single generation. Usually, a word may appear in the Oxford English Dictionary only after a decade from the time of its first use. Today, however, it takes only a day or so for a new word to be added to the increasingly accepted web site, urbandictionary.com.

In the end, “the heart of language is molten,” says Rahul. “It always has been. Structure and order appear at the periphery and this is useful because the rules give us ground to stand upon. But the centre, it is a furnace, and it is in that furnace that we constantly remake ourselves, our past, our present and our future.”