Chat research

An overview of chat research has pointed out that things haven't changed that much in ten years or so, in spite of the fact that the world has evolved, and more people have integrated chat into their everyday lives.

Of course businesses noticed that if they put a little chat window on their website, and monitored it 24/7, or at least eight hours a day, this was good for their business and gave a little personal dimension to a personal relationship that they would have loved to have had, when you walked in the door, if you did. Now, during the pandemic, this little chat window is all they've got, since people are not walking in doors. And the personal dimension of it is huge, in business, anyone can tell you that. If you've been polite, and welcoming, and provided information, that's half the battle. More than half.

But here's my question, related to language development. I have been struggling to put this in words or at least state the questions that I could possibly research, so forgive me with struggling with it here in front of you while I gather up my thinking. Way back in the early days of Krashen (I taught ESL for thirty years) I thought his philosophy was best put into words by a guy who was once explaining it to me. They were totally absorbed in the oral realm for the entire first year or two of a language learner's experience, and didn't even approach the alphabet or the hand on the pen until maybe the second year. And he said, "Look, it all starts with basic confidence in oral interaction, the 'hello/how are you' stage. You have to have that basic ability to form a sentence spontaneously, to just say you're fine, how's the weather, that kind of stuff, until you can make longer sentences that really get into what you're thinking. So we spend the first year doing that until they can 'live' in English. The traditional model of giving them a writing class and 'writing paragraphs' just doesn't make sense until they have that basic confidence."

Now you may see where I'm going with this. This was well before the age of chat, when you could do hello/how are you all on your phone before you even said a word. The assumption then was that writing was all higher-level thinking, all based on speaking that had already been developed. Now another belief that came from that era was, "if their listening is good, their writing will be correspondingly good," as if their ability to parse longer strings of language translated directly into their ability to produce them, on paper, with reasonably solid construction. So writing then was all a higher-level, longer-sentence experience in which you'd ask your students to sit and just produce the best paragraph or essay that they could, as soon as they were possibly ready.

I set about having my writing classes on a chat network. It was called Edmodo and it was basically small class-based twitter-like chat networks where only we could see what we were chatting and we could always print it out later and analyze what happened. Their attitude was, "am I required to do this" and "how much do I have to do?" but still they were somewhat fascinated. These same people often froze at a computer at test time, struggling with the confidence required to produce an "essay" or whatever we required. Yet I'd see them at their phones, or even at their computers, chatting like wildfire in Ascii-Arabic, or what I called "3-5-7-9 chat", a language that used English letters and numbers but orally came out like their own Arabic dialect. They spoke freely with me about it - most of them who had minimal exposure to English letters could get started, as the numbers involved closely resembled easily recognizable Arabic letters. And they had plenty of confidence in this Ascii-Arabic - they used it enough to be quite good at it.

I had varying success in getting them to start producing chat on the class level in the edmodo network or anywhere else. I would occasionally get them on there and ask them more hello/how are you questions. Going to the social event tonight? How's your family? I figured that if I got their confidence up on this very basic level it would have some influence on their higher-level production of such things as essays, which of course required you to organize at the same time you wrote, but above all required that you have basic, solid sentence structure skills that would enable your readers to always know what you meant. I didn't really have time to prove that it was a viable method, or even to tweak the method and make it so that doing low-level chatting could improve one's confidence, or have some influence on one's higher level skills. My reception at TESOL's was lukewarm, as if I were introducing gaming as a method of language learning (I had friends who did this as well, and friends who used Second Life).

But I can give you some insight from those years. First, assume that every student under the age of about thirty has a phone and has been using it actively for as many years as they've been able to; this would include texting in their own language as well as probably Messenger, What's App or whatever other active chat servers are out there, that they could be using to stay in touch. Second, present writing as a medium that has all the complexity that speaking does, where you might have to do plenty of hello/how are you in it, and negotiate, and confirm meaning, and all that interactional stuff, as part of mastering the skill of actively typing in real time. Third, maintain that you can and should start from the bottom up with writing, so that you don't learn to write entire essays before you're good at hello/how are you, or so that you recognize the value of both, if not work on both independently. Fourth, and stress this, the major difference between writing and oral communication is that writing last forever - it's clearly recorded, it goes in the record books - we can dredge it up and prove that you wrote this, they wrote that, etc. etc. It's for keeps. In an electronic manner of speaking, of course.

gonna wanna think about it

So here's my point with chat, which I've been mulling over so as to put into words more clearly. For centuries writing and speaking have had a certain relationship in our language. In speaking, we could take shortcuts, change the way things sounded, experiment a little to see what we could get away with. In writing however we were much more formal. Because we had to speak to people far and wide, we reached more binding, formal agreement about how things were spelled etc., and these didn't change easily, though they did change a little over time. Speech was lively, more common, more likely to change, and far more variable. Writing was established by common rules which were argued over, but which once agreed upon, remained unchanged (relatively) in various environments.

Ah but it didn't have to be this way; it only evolved this way through cultural agreement. There is nothing about speaking which is by nature more changeable, more volatile, more informal, than writing. There is nothing about writing which is by nature stodgier and slower to change.

And that's what chat can teach us. Writing itself can be spontaneous, changeable, open to variation and even dialect. And here's the big one: Writing can in fact come first. We are used to writing coming from speech, as if speech came first, and was basic, and was the essence of language, whereas writing was a couple of steps removed: it represents speech, and then speech represents meaning, so writing by nature has to go through speech to get to the part where you understand what I mean. You have to hear it, and then understand it, right? So we have to agree on the sounds that writing represents, right?

Wrong. Or, to put it more clearly, it doesn't have to be that way by nature. Just because we have evolved that way, and it has been that way, doesn't mean it has to keep being that way, or it's always that way. It could be the other way around.

I will try to find examples. Chat is the key.

So I've retired, and I spend most of my time on my own personal writing which you are welcome to explore. As part of retiring I got all the genealogical files and I've been going through them, which means that some of the writing is mostly for family, mostly about old puritans and homesteaders and pioneers.

So I don't have much to say about chat these days except that 1) I think it has evolved somewhat and people are using chat as a medium in all kinds of places, and all kinds of ways; 2) I still think we should study it and give it the kind of respect we give written language and its evolution, in general, in linguistics; 3) in fact you could call this the golden age of chat, since it just became a thing what, maybe fifteen years ago, and people are using it so actively, and starting up on it, and by nature it's going to simplify itself and become more useful. And you see things like lol popping up everywhere; people are even saying it, which shows it doesn't always start with the oral and move to the written, i.e. not all written language comes from oral language.

It turns out, I have a lot to say, and I am busy chatting or txtng on my phone just like everyone else is. I am guilty of developing my own system and then kind of watching myself from above as I do whatever I can get away with in the chat universe. I will repeat that it does deserve respect, it does need to be studied, and I'm glad I put this blog here, even though I don't quite know what to do with it now; I certainly won't shut it down as deep within it, it documents the beginning of this era. It's actually a quite incredible phenomenon, as I said, and it's not going anywhere.

emoticons

Emoticons, you could say, have captured the public’s fancy. People want to make them on their phones, in their texts, on Facebook, even in e-mails. They learn how to make new ones and see if they fit, that is, if they express useful things, and if other people understand them. Whole Facebook sites spring up for emoticon use in general, or even for a specific one.

But I found two separate studies that both said that emoticon use in texting is at about 4%, with women using them more than men. In my own phone it was 0%; people like me are bringing the average down. And that brings me to my first point, which is that I admit there’s a good likelihood that I don’t know what I’m talking about, since they are used widely, in a number of very different situations, by different people, and for widely different purposes. I only see a corner of the action: 500 Facebook friends and a limited number of people whom I text regularly. We are not big emoticon users. But there are plenty out there, and use, in general, is probably increasing.

At first, I thought, this is interesting, and revolutionary: a pictoral hieroglyphic language that is not based on sounds, where symbols have direct meaning without going through their spoken-language equivalent. But, upon reflection, I decided that we have actually been using them for a long time. How long has XOXOX referred to kisses and hugs? Has $#@#$ referred to the so-called ‘four-letter words?’ Hieroglyphics themselves are as old as, well, ancient Egypt. So what’s the fuss?

What’s different is clearly that we have so many different media to use them in. Facebook alone has the main posts, and the chat; there are our phones, with their texting plans, and Apple trying to steal business away from the phone carriers by providing texting free to its users. So many of these machines reward emoticon users because they limit the number of characters one can use. Economy may dictate that we say with a smiley face or a wink what might otherwise take an entire sentence.

So what gets people to use them all the time, and in particular, use the three big ones 70% of the time? I’m referring to the Rice study, which said that smiley-face, frowny-face, and very-smiley face (colon D, I assume) accounted for 70% of the emoticons there were. At first I was surprised that wink (semi-colon parenthesis) and tongue-out (colon – P) weren’t on the list. But a lot of things can account for the relative frequency of an emoticon. If you invent one, and make a Facebook page for it, and advertise it, even then it might not catch on. But those big three are doing fine: why?

First you have to know that everyone you use it with will recognize and understand it. All of the big three are at that 100% recognition mark, but I’m not sure you can say the same for wink and tongue-out. Then again, it has to be genuinely useful in a number of situations. One guy said, “I never stick my tongue out in person; why should I need a symbol that does it for me?” You, do, howver, smile, frown, and smile broadly, and in many circumstances.

So then, the major question: Are they increasing dramatically? Slowly? Not at all? Or what? I think they will increase slowly until even guys like me start using them. I think women will continue using them more than men but everyone will reach a ceiling beyond which they won’t go. There are two frequency variables: number of emoticons per hundred texts, and number of emoticons per text. Even now, we’re only at 4 per hundred texts; very few people are using more than one per text regularly. One said, “I use smiley-face as a kind of text-punctuation. When the text is over, I smile.” I mention this because the emoticon seems to operate on the sentence level, like an exclamation point, rather than at the word level, where you might get five or six in a single sentence, given the right variety. No, you probably won’t find more than one per sentence, or one per text, as a general rule (this is my guess). And then, we will reach a point of balance: lots of emoticons, perhaps one per sentence, but never much more than that. We appear to be in no immediate danger of losing our word-based language in favor of a language consisting of a small group of picture-symbols each of which has several meanings. You can really only have so many emoticons, then you have to let words do the rest.

I've neglected this blog for what, a few years. But it's not because I've lost interest in chat and what it does and what you can do with it. Chat has, overall, been subsumed by texting. Texting has exploded as a means of communication. People focus less on the live interaction, chat, IMing they call it sometimes, because it's so convenient to just shoot texts back and forth at will, at one's leisure. This spreads it out more.

The total amount of informal writing continues to skyrocket. I read an article recently that was using trillions - trillions of texts? A few people study it around the edges. My impulse is to collect these studies and collect our gathered knowledge about texting with the intention of being a linguist of texting.

The vast majority of news stories about texting involve texters who killed someone on the highway, or were involved in accidents of some sort. Then you have the legislatures and city governments that are criminalizing texting and driving. If you wade through those you find a few others about how texting has vastly changed social life for young people and in fact anyone who lives in a world where people are actively texting. Finally, you get the studies around the edges, where people are figuring out who is using emoticons, and why, and to what degree.

Emoticons are interesting because they are part of what makes texting different from regular written communication. Let's see, you have shortened words, lol, a few of these and those, and emoticons. My point as a linguist is that texters would have different dialect patterns than others because so much of it goes across geographical boundaries. I would basically like to do for texting what Labov did for dialects: map them. Figure out the distribution of dialects within networks. Find out who is using what, where.

My main justification for studying it as a linguist would be this: If people relate to the phone - they change what they type based on the phone - and the phone changes what they type - then, making language is a very different process than it used to be back in the era of oral and plain written communication. Phones change what we type. Phones' auto correct essentially trains us to type some things and not others. On the interpreting end we have to guess sometimes what somebody intended to type. All this points to a different process than Saussure, and even Chomsky, tried to explain.

I may collect some of this stuff here, but better yet, I may just start a new site and set of resources. I have to bring back much of my online stuff anyway. This poor site was getting pretty stale and old. But it holds stuff that is important to me, old chat transcripts and the like. I'm not sure what will happen, I'm just stewing about the possibilities.

tunisian araby w/translation

(machine translated by http://3arabi.site.co.il/)

Ya jme3a svp walah kont tawa na7ki par tlphne w t2akedt enou ma fama 7ata mochkla ma bine el jaych w el 7aras eri2esi w met3awnine barcha m3a b3adhhom rabi yonsorhom rahom elkol rjel tunis w 8aliiiine 3la 9loubna

O Fri Sfb with you just tell bar phone and confirmed that what even what the problem is between the army and guard L. major and Drink collaborators with the Lord grant them victory after them, some say a man involved and Tunisia to our hearts

el7amdola byad wajh tunis godam la3rab
alah yihlika zin 5alana chibh kofar godam la3rab
m6 tamer biragm man7ibouch

Elhamdula white face Tunisia Jaddam to perish Aaraballah Zine Khalna semi Kfar Jaddam to Aarabmt Tamer despite Mnhabk

Allah ya3tikom na7aya
God bless hand

nsa la7lela bela7ram t3abi el kerech hathaka ach 3mal ben 3li
Nasa to Ahalila haraam tired penny Hamak L. Ashe work Ben Ali

NJ & beyond

My chat presentation was given again, this time at the NJ Higher Ed ESL Conference in Montclair NJ. I barely changed my script, but did, and pointed out Edmodo and other new things. People however were quite interested in the blogs themselves, and all changes that have come out of them. Between this New Jersey conference, and Miranda's presentation (see below), and with other perspective, I've noticed a few changes in the landscape.

Some people are quite focused on how chatting and informal language improves more formal writing. There is a connection, as Miranda pointed out, having to do with fluency and confidence; I should keep Peter Elbow references closer at hand, as he is who I draw my inspiration from. The fluency-first movement, as applied to reading, writing, speaking, and all language skills, basically was right when it said that you have to be comfortable in your own informal writing self, before you can really crank out the structured stuff; thus it makes little sense to demand essays out of intermediate students who really don't write much of anything else. Under questioning I also said this in New Jersey: increase the amount of writing your students do. Let them compare relentlessly what they said, and what would have worked better (Community Language Learning). Informalize the setting; concentrate on the communication. Make them write so much that they never have trouble getting started.

I had a discussion with Miranda Ma, following her presentation on using weblogs, which was given at SIUC and well-attended. We came around to my favorite topic, which was chatting and how the world is tending toward a lot of code-switching these days. She told me a little bit about life in Macau, and Hong Kong, where she grew up, and I was determined to save it, though a couple of days have passed already.

It's an agreed-upon fact that young people are code-switching more, and particularly in online environments, and mixing languages in ways that older people would not generally allow. We flung examples around, and at one point she said that Hong Kong people were notorious for it; later, a youtube that she shared gave some details on who did it, how, and possibly why. I haven't yet watched the youtube so I'll put it here and peruse it later, but, the upshot is that it means different things to different people, and some (most notably, the mainland Chinese) didn't care for it at all. Also, she said that clearly people don't tend to code-switch within words (at least not as a general pattern), but were more likely to code-switch within sentences or larger environments.

She herself grew up in a household where Taishanese was spoken, but her grandparents spoke Burmese, so she knew several languages from the start. Taishanese, she said, is much like Cantonese, but not quite. Yes, people who knew them both went back and forth quite a bit.

Then came my own idea, that came out of the blue, more or less. In my generation, I said, language was more closely bound by culture, so your use of language was by nature identification with culture. It seems to me that if you truly separate it from culture, then you're free to simply use the best language for the best purpose, as you would pick tools from a large assortment, picking the best one for the best job. but if you are aware of language as a kind of identification, you are more likely to reject code-switching as a pattern and show a clear preference for one language. But language isn't necessarily cultural by nature. If people are truly bi-cultural, they are more likely to simply be free to use what they wish with others who are similar. Why not?