LONG BEACH, CA—Is texting shorthand a convenience, a catastrophe for the English language, or actually something new and special? John McWhorter, a linguist at Columbia University, sides with the latter. According to McWhorter, texting is actually a new form of speech, and he outlined the reasons why today at the TED2013 conference in Southern California.

We often hear that “texting is a scourge,” damaging the literacy of the young. But it’s “actually a miraculous thing,” McWhorter said. Texting, he argued, is not really writing at all—not in the way we have historically thought about writing. To explain this, he drew an important distinction between speech and writing as functions of language. Language was born in speech some 80,000 years ago (at least). Writing, on the other hand, is relatively new (5,000 or 6,000 years old). So humanity has been talking for longer than it has been writing, and this is especially true when you consider that writing skills have hardly been ubiquitous in human societies.

Furthermore, writing is typically not a reflection of casual speech. “We speak in word packets of seven to 10 words. It’s much more loose, much more telegraphic,” McWhorter said. Of course, speech can imitate writing, particularly in formal contexts like speechmaking. He pointed out that in those cases you might speak like you write, but it's clearly not a natural way of speaking.

But what about writing like you speak? Historically this has been difficult. Speed is a key issue. “[Texting is] fingered-speech. Now we can write the way we talk,” McWhorter said. Yet we view this as some kind of decline. We don’t capitalize words, obey grammar or spelling rules, and the like. Yet there is an “emerging complexity…with new structure” at play. To McWhorter, this structure facilitates the speed and packeted nature of real speech.

Take "LOL," for instance. It used to mean “laughing out loud,” but its meaning has changed. People aren’t guffawing every time they write it. Now “it’s a marker of empathy, a pragmatic particle,” he said. “It’s a way of using the language between actual people.”

This is just one example of a new battery of conventions McWhorter sees in texting. They are conventions that enable writing like we speak. Consider the rules of grammar. When you talk, you don’t think about capitalizing names or putting commas and question marks where they belong. You produce sounds, not written language. Texting leaves out many of these conventions, particularly among the young, who make extensive use of electronic communication tools.

McWhorter thinks what we are experiencing is a whole new way of writing that young people are using alongside their normal writing skills. It is a “balancing act… an expansion of their linguistic repertoire,” he argued.

The result is a whole new language, one that wouldn't be intelligible to people in the year 1993 or 1973. And where it's headed, it will likely be unintelligible to us were we to jump ahead 20 years in time. Nevertheless, McWhorter wants us to appreciate it now: “It’s a linguistic miracle happening right under our noses,” he said.

Forget the "death of writing" talk. Txt-speak is a new, rapidly evolving form of speech.

Listing image by Javier Benek