MASHABLE: Millennials destroyed the rules of written English – and created something better

  • Lauren Fonteyn

Press/Media: Expert comment

Description

Dr Lauren Fonteyn, English Linguistics lecturer at University of Manchester, told Mashable "something exciting" is happening with the way that millennials write, and it goes far, far beyond our proclivity to use acronyms and "like."  

 

 

Fonteyn says millennials are "breaking the constraints" of written English to "be asexpressive as you can be in spoken language." This new variant of written English strives to convey what body language, and tone and volume of voice can achieve in spoken English. 

 

Fonteyn says that on a superficial level, we can see millennials stripping anything unnecessary from their writing, like the removal of abbreviation markers in "dont," "cant," "im" and in acronyms like tf, ur, bc, idk, and lol. In a world where most of our conversations take place online, millennials are using a number of written devices to convey things that could typically only be communicated by cadence, volume, or even body language. 

 

One such device is "atypical capitalisation," according to Fonteyn, a break from a rule prescribed by standard spelling, which states that capitalisation is "reserved for proper nouns, people, countries, brands, the first person pronoun, and the first word in a new sentence." 

 

"What we see in millennial spelling is different, but not unruly," says Fonteyn. "Capitals are not necessarily used for people (we know who ed sheeran is, it’s Ed Sheeran), or initial words of a text or tweet."

Period2 Apr 2018

Media contributions

1

Media contributions

  • TitleMillennials destroyed the rules of written English – and created something better
    Media name/outletMashable
    Media typeWeb
    Country/TerritoryUnited Kingdom
    Date2/04/18
    DescriptionDr Lauren Fonteyn, English Linguistics lecturer at University of Manchester, told Mashable "something exciting" is happening with the way that millennials write, and it goes far, far beyond our proclivity to use acronyms and "like."

    Fonteyn says millennials are "breaking the constraints" of written English to "be as expressive as you can be in spoken language." This new variant of written English strives to convey what body language, and tone and volume of voice can achieve in spoken English.

    Fonteyn says that on a superficial level, we can see millennials stripping anything unnecessary from their writing, like the removal of abbreviation markers in "dont," "cant," "im" and in acronyms like tf, ur, bc, idk, and lol. In a world where most of our conversations take place online, millennials are using a number of written devices to convey things that could typically only be communicated by cadence, volume, or even body language.

    One such device is "atypical capitalisation," according to Fonteyn, a break from a rule prescribed by standard spelling, which states that capitalisation is "reserved for proper nouns, people, countries, brands, the first person pronoun, and the first word in a new sentence."

    "What we see in millennial spelling is different, but not unruly," says Fonteyn. "Capitals are not necessarily used for people (we know who ed sheeran is, it’s Ed Sheeran), or initial words of a text or tweet."
    URLhttps://mashable.com/2018/04/02/millennials-written-english/#DbOk0_m3zmqz
    PersonsLauren Fonteyn

Keywords

  • language
  • millennials
  • English