The rise of social media has put “conversation without speech” at the centre of millions of lives, as Tom Chatfield explains

Where once speech was the driving force behind language change, we are moving into an era where writing – or, more precisely, the act of typing on to screens – is a dominant form of verbal interaction. And this has brought with it an accelerating transformation of not only the words we use, but how we read each others’ lives.

Consider the emoticon: a human face sketched from three punctuation marks. Born during the course of an early online discussion in 1982, courtesy of computer scientist Scott Fahlman, it addressed one central absence of onscreen words: a human face able to indicate emotional tone.

Fahlman coined two basic expressions – “happy” and “sad” (signalling “joking” and “not joking” respectively) – but further variations almost immediately began to spring up, stretching today into many thousands. Aside from bewildering ingenuity, one thing all of these share is that they are unpronounceable: symbols aimed at the eye rather than at the ear, like an emotionally enriched layer of punctuation.

There’s nothing inherently new about such effects. In 1925, the American professor George Krapp coined the phrase “eye dialect” to describe the use of selected mis-spellings in fiction signalling a character’s accent without requiring a phonetic rendering of their speech. Mark Twain, for example, used just a handful of spelling variations to convey the colourful speech of his character Jim in Huckleberry Finn (1884), such as “ben” for been and “wuz” for was. More.

See: The independent

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