Fascinating developments in the complex nuances of human communication are happening in our relatively new (that is, relative to our hundreds of thousands of years of human language) electronic social platforms.

Communication goes beyond our vernacular – it encompasses all of the nuances of body language, expression, tonality, etc. that play a role in transmitting meaning and intention. These signals are thoughtlessly utilized and we don’t remember learning them. For instance, wording may often suffice in conveying sarcasm, but it isn’t full proof. We can all attest to having an interaction through social media or text in which intention was thwarted by a lack of expressive facilities. However, we can now see on social mediums such as facebook, twitter, and text, a deviation from “proper” spelling and grammar to enact tonality. For instance, we interpret “ur kidding me” and “You’re kidding me.” differently. The lack of punctuation, capitalization, and substandard spelling elicit a dry, monotonous tone.

These breaks from standard language seem to be mostly adopted by millennials, as young people usually do generate development in dialect. Have you ever noticed while scrolling the comment threads of controversial Facebook posts that so often, someone feels the need to correct the spelling and writing habits of someone younger as a means to invalidate them all together? That is not to say young people that feel a bit too good for their peers aren’t guilty of this either. They’ll lament the laziness and stupidity of “this generation” because “you can’t take the time to spell ‘your’ or spell out ‘I don’t know.’” There are a lot of examples. But substitutions such as “ur” and “idk” actually follow how spoken language develops in social environments.

Consider a word like “gonna.” We have fused “going” and “to” to shorten our sentences in casual settings. Think of how you would actually pronounce, “I’m going to go.” Many of us would say something that sounds like “I’mmna go.” Do we not understand how to pronounce these words? Of course we do. And no one’s telling us to “learn to speak.” Well, no one is typing “ur” or using acronyms because they can’t spell these words. The same phenomenon is occurring – they are alterations to causal communication, but when it’s time to email your professor or write that dissertation, that written dialect is out the window.

But why the code switching in written language now when we’ve done it verbally for so long? Why do we interpret the unadoption of standard language to be heresy in writing and not speech? Because communicating through writing in real time is a rather new experience, as are these environments of media and communication. Writing letters or emails, even to your best friend, has an intrinsic formality to it that real time communication does not. That is what is so interesting about the many ways written communication is being implemented online (and there are far more examples than the few I’ve laid out); we are seeing rapid changes in casual communication develop just as they have in verbal communication.