Txting

Yesterday, I was giving a short presentation on 'Teaching Electronic Communication' at a conference at ITB, and the question arose (as it so often does) whether the writing of young people today is being corrupted by SMS-style abbreviations. Indeed, this seems to be a concern around the world, though I am not sure there is actually any solid evidence that the writing of young people is getting worse.

I would like to consider one aspect of this, something that might be affecting the influence of short forms in SMS messages: the use of predictive texting (where you press each key just once and let your mobile phone sort out what the word is). I suggest that this will help with spelling, as you need to know how to spell correctly for it to work; and it may also reduce the use of abbreviated words, as it becomes faster to type the whole word than the shortened form.

However, in Brunei, predictive texting may be used less widely than in some other countries, because of the widespread preference for English/Malay code-mixing. I am pretty sure that few implementations of predictive texting can handle mixed text, and this may be why most texters in Brunei still use the traditional way of typing out messages, even though that involves so many additional keyclicks. (I admit I don't have any data on this, and it would be fascinating to find out.)

One other possibility is this: if predictive texting does become popular in Brunei, it might have a substantial influence on the occurrence of code-mixing in text messages.