Shiksha Opinion: V r lyk dis nly

Manish: Yo! Wats up?
Pooja: Bro my BFF gtng maried
Manish: Wat??? Pinky??? wid whm?? Dnt sy Rohan LMAO
Pooja: Gr8 n BTW he is gud
Manish: ROTFLMAO
Pooja: Wil tel detlz sn TTYL

Shocked? Well this is how students are often seen chatting these days and one can’t help feel bad for parents when they are left flabbergasted on receiving their kids message them. Well, the above conversation can easily give you a glimpse into what they experience. And this is not the case only with college students but with children at school as well.

The SMS lingo was developed and popularised because everyone wanted to convey their message in as few characters as they possibly could so as to save money. But with time children started considering SMS lingo to be a kind of code language wherein they could communicate their secrets to their friends or siblings without their parents having the slightest hint of what is happening around them.

Some school teachers we spoke to shared that these days students often end up using SMS lingo in their assignments as well as examinations. Sunita Verma, an English teacher with a Delhi school elaborated on the same saying that, “There is a dramatic decline in the writing abilities of students. Any word longer than one syllable is now abbreviated and you can simply forget about seeing children use punctuations all together.” She further blamed social media to be the catalyst in helping this trend become popular, “Frequent Tweeting, Facebooking and texting are the primary reasons why students as young as 10 years have started using such language”.

That got us thinking whether our younger generation is simply getting dumber? Dr Rajendra Barve, a clinical psychiatrist shares that “abbreviations have been around for a long time but they were known to everyone. The new SMS lingo is not about abbreviations but ATTITUDE”. He further elaborated stating, “It’s not rebellion against longer words but basically laziness not to spell the word”. So basically children of today are not dumber but definitely lazier.

However, studies suggest that in the long run, using SMS lingo can affect the memory of students. Dr Barve supports the same saying, “Learning spellings is part of growing and enriching memory. The more one writes and spells words; there is cause to believe that the memory becomes sharper. Each word carries a history and feelings associated with it and spelling them in entirety helps children understand that feeling when they spell the word out but the students of today won't be able to understand the discrete meanings of words”. But the trend of using SMS lingo is fast becoming a trend and Dr Barve has too experienced it first hand and he shares the experience, “recently, a young student said: Sir have SD? When I looked puzzled, he explained by saying: Sweet Dreams Sir!”

This is definitely an alarming issue which requires immediate attention. But we should take an informed decision and for that we should know the pros and cons of pursuing or rejecting anything. So, let us list out the good as well as bas aspects of using SMS lingo.

SMS Lingo
The Good	The Bad
Quickness factor: In the age of technology such as laptops, tablets, smart phones etc. being swift in responding to a situation or voicing your opinion is an advantage.	Vocabulary: The biggest flaw of using SMS lingo is that it is hinders the usage of words that actually mean something.
Communicate more: SMS lingo helps one to give more information in a limited space. So, the vocabulary or spelling may be wrong but atleast the complete news point is communicated. In a stress/breaking news situation this can be an ace!	Spellings: Well, this aspect of language has gone into the trash. To support this fact, I know atleast seven of my friends who don’t know the correct spelling of the word ‘awesome’, most of them think the correct way to spell this word is: ‘awsum’, thanks to watsapp!
Understandable: Leaving aside the older generation, most people understand the everyday slangs used in SMS lingo. So, people who are not very fluent with English can understand the core message as well.	Informal Communication: The way we write has become very conversational. This may be good if we are talking to friends but the same form of communication with teachers or your boss is not the ideal way.
	Sentence formation: Students these days have no sense of sentence structuring. They simply have an idea which they haphazardly put together by using random words
	Punctuations: Kids of today feel that punctuations are a passé and we wouldn’t be surprised if they actually do not even know why some such punctuation marks actually exist.

So, there you have it, the pros and cons of using SMS lingo. We agree that using this lingo among friends is not harmful but making it a practice at schools, colleges and offices, definitely gets a thumbs down from us.

We agree that change is the only constant and with the advent of new technology everything right from the way we communicate to how we communicate changes. But the extent and the sphere till where we let that change affects us is the main concern.

And in this article even we have taken the leverage of using the term “lingo” which in itself is a slang which over time has become acceptable as a separate word in English language.

It is good to embrace new things in life but at the end of the day each one of us has a choice to make and I feel if the choice is to save our language, then we should definitely vouch for that!