texting & email language & back-slang

[ClaireM]

Is anyone out there making a dictionary of the somewhat incomprehensible language used by 12-18 year olds when composing e-mails and text-messages to their friends? I know that the main rule is to miss out vowels as much as possible, and to use emoticons like there is no tomorrow, but beyond that it is as mysterious to me as our back-slang was to our parents.
With regard to back-slang, the easiest one to say was based on the insertion of the syllable 'eg' before sounding any vowel in a word, and in which eg-I became corrupted to 'eggy'. Thus, "I have a cat" became (phonetically) "eggy hegav ega kegat". Having grasped the 'eg' version, more complex syllables or sounds could be substituted for the 'eg,' and for the really adept, more than one substitution could be made depending on the original word forms. However, my own parents were pretty damn quick on the draw with this, and prattled away in their own version so that it was I who was left mystified.
I was, however, brought up on cryptic crosswords from the major weekend newspapers. These were always conducted verbally, because father kept an iron grip on the paper and pen, did not permit anyone else to look at the clues, and expected that we could easily handle clues like this: "emmet-scoffer 8 letters: A blank blank D blank A blank K".

Cheers
ClaireM

[sluggo]

Claire - Just a stab in the dark, but over in this thread tangent* we dipped into emailspeak a bit (for lack of a better term):

*“OMG wau!! Dat beesing a kiti vary ful ov tewtul kutenis!! Bees wif da lukingz! Omg him gotz da bowwagez on himz hed lyk WTF?!?”

-but I suspect Melissa would be our resident dialectician on this ...

"Back-slang" is a term I've not heard before, but your example thereof reminds of a trend of perhaps a quarter-century ago where one would drop the initial syllable of (usually) a two-syllable noun, e.g. "parents" became 'rents, and "Do you have any matches?" would become "got 'chez?"

[melissa]

-but I suspect Melissa would be our resident dialectician on this ...

ZOMG IM TEH 1337 dialexxor here? SRSLY tho Claire, I think you're right that texting slang is used mostly to keep others (meaning parents and other authority figures) out of the loop, and I avoid most of it, admitting that some abbreviations are useful. But as a slang it seems effective, being more complex than any I've come across before. The wiki is reasonably accurate, and urban dictionary not so much but more extensive. Coming from hacker slang, I am impressed that it has maintained a level of intelligence in its complicated references if not in its sound, er, spelling.

I still think it worthy of linguistic study, teh kitteh notwithstanding.

-m

[sluggo]

Melissa, I knew you'd be all over it

Quel treasure trove of info in the Wiki link! I learned a lot, though not likely to put it in play. The BBC link in its references was also illuminating.

- Slug-still-not-clear-if-1337-and-"teh-kitteh"-are-different-entities-go

[Perry]

The back slang reminded my of the "pig-latin" of my youth.

As for L33T, I am not even going to try to learn it. It's against my religion (at least linguistically - ask me if you don't cotton on to my reference).

[gailr]

Slug-still-not-clear-if-1337-and-"teh-kitteh"-are-different-entities-go

Melissa, correct this if I'm wrong!

sluggo: based on the written and spoken communication of the younger artists I know, the two groups could be -- very broadly -- differentiated thusly:

1337 [leet] is the lingua franca of [mostly male] adolescents [emotionally & socially, regardless of chronological age] who can't get dates [not that they notice, nor would it occur to them to interface with actual females] as they are too busy pwn!ing each other in geeky computer games and outdoing each other in ways to write incomprehensibly, thereby, um, winning.

teh kitteh is the lingua franca of [mostly female] adherents, although males excel here too. They range from just old enough to play with Barbies to just old enough to be Marketers for Barbie. If the joke or message is so obtuse that no one gets it, it fails in kitteh. May frighten off potential dates if terminal cuteness is not under conscious control.

-gailr
who occasionally uses kitteh lite

[sluggo]

...Shredded Leet?

(I'm giving up on posting images in here forever)

[gailr]

IC d bx B dissin Otmelz!1!