The advent of text messaging as a ubiquitous mode of communication has spurred considerable interest in its impact on language skills. Researchers have investigated whether the informal register ...

English teacher Carrie Beth Buchanan sees the effects of students’ growing up in an age when communication is done in an abbreviated text language and where they depend on autocorrect to automatically ...

“How am I even supposed to respond to this?” My friend shows me her phone screen, where her dad has replied to a long, complicated, logistic-filled text message with a simple “Ok 👍.” We’ve all been ...

Regular readers of this column will know that I am suspicious of cyberspace innovations — from Facebook to MySpace to Second Life — that substitute the accumulation of “friends” for actual friendship, ...

Two weeks ago I gave a talk to a group of University of Michigan at Ann Arbor undergraduates called “Txtng and the Future of English.” As a linguist who studies the history of the English language, I ...