Millennials have come in for a lot of stick lately.
Whether it’s because they’re all overweight, eat too much avocado toast or still need their mum’s help with chores around the house, the older generations love to poke fun at those born between 1981 and 2000.
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But millennials may be a lot wiser than they’ve previously been given credit for, because it looks like they’ve managed to create their own online language.
Twitter user Deanna Hoek – a copy editor with a master’s degree in sociolinguistics – shared a post online about how millennials use subtle and nuanced changes in grammar to convey different meanings in the way they write online.
And it sparked a debate on social media about how language evolves – with many praising millennials for their use of grammar to alter the tone and language of their sentence online where things like sarcasm are often hard to convey.
Now when you judge young people for having "poor grammar in their texts" consider that they're actually more clever and pragmatic than you are in yours, and developed their practices spontaneously to overcome the limitations imposed by the legacy of QWERTY and Mavis Beacon. https://t.co/bfg7juKDCL
— Chris Messina // molly.com/chris (@chrismessina) March 4, 2018
In the original post Deanna shared, one person wrote: ‘It’s kinda cool how our generation has created actual tone in the way we write online.
‘Like whether we: write properly with perfect grammar, shrthnd everythin, use capitals to emphasise The Point, use extra letters or characters for emotion!!!!!, and much more – it means we can have casual conversations, effectively make jokes using things like sarcasm that’s usually hard to understand without context and much more.
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‘This “incorrect English” has really opened avenues of online conversation that isn’t accessible with “correct English” which is pretty interesting.’
Another wrote: ‘My class taught some of the nuances of this to our English teacher.
‘It makes perfect sense lingusitically that we would create this complexity to ease communication in a medium without body language or tone, but what my teacher was really floored about was that none of this had ever ‘learned it’, we’re ‘native speakers’ of a whole new type of English.’
THIS. See also the ways in which we emphatically add our agreement, the different ways in which we *emphasise* the important or mock the ~important~, express our utter suRPRISE, and use emoji to better convey tone with concise language
Not to mention the Art of meme humour
https://t.co/eyPGdPR7oD
— Thal (@thalestral) March 4, 2018
Another thing I think is interesting is the use of “oh” –
“o” – “ohhh” – and “oooo”. generally leaving “h”s and adding multiple characters gives a completely different vibe, or is that just me?— becky sexwoman from saw (@birbdere) March 6, 2018
Twitter user Thal replied: ‘See also the ways in which we emphatically add our agreement, the different ways in which we *emphasise* the important or mock the ~important~, express our utter suRPRISE, and use emoji to better convey tone with concise language.’
Deanna wrote: ‘My daughter texted me “k.” in reply to something a couple years ago because she was irritated at me.
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‘It backfired, because she spent the next few months thinking I was mad at her because I kept replying the same way, thinking that’s just how the kids did it.’
While another user said: ‘Another thing I think is interesting is the use of “oh” – “o” – “ohhh” – and “oooo”. generally leaving “h”s and adding multiple characters gives a completely different vibe, or is that just me?’
So, it seems like millennials’ grammar is better than originally thought because, according to Chris Messina because ‘when you judge young people for having “poor grammar in their texts” consider that they’re actually more clever and pragmatic than you are in yours, and developed their practices spontaneously to overcome the limitations imposed by the legacy of QWERTY and Mavis Beacon’.
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