Text-speak: What tongue is this?

Scholarship America, the administrator for some of the country's largest scholarships, receives a few applications each year that really stand out - because they use a language other than English.

It's not Spanish. And it's not Chinese.

Tucked into their pleas for $10,000 packages rewarding academic prowess is text-speak, said spokeswoman Janine Fugate.

"OMG," you say. "Dat dznt sound 2 gd :("

(Translation: Oh, my God. That doesn't sound too good.)

It's enough to make teachers and professors across the country retreat under their dictionaries. But the ubiquitous language - a creative shorthand that results from typing on a minuscule keypad - is a hard habit to break for students who sometimes text more than they talk. As the most prevalent communication used by anyone age 12 to 22, text-speak is seeping into the most formal of correspondence on college campuses: e-mails to professors, tests and term papers, and recommendation requests.

"They're much more careless with how they write," said Cheryl Copeland, associate professor of English at Camden County College, who sees evidence of texting in e-mails, in quizzes, in homework, and sometimes in papers. Although she always reads them, to reinforce the need for proper grammar Copeland tells students she won't answer any e-mails with nonstandard abbreviations.

"They don't use capitals. Sometimes they just use symbols, like the letter u for you and a small i for I. Would somebody who learned shorthand years ago ever think of using that in responding to a professor?"

Well, of course not.

But two years ago, a Pew Research Center survey found that half of teens dropped capitalization and punctuation in their school assignments, 38 percent used acronyms such as "LOL" - laughing out loud - and one-quarter added emoticons to schoolwork.

But it's not just the prevalence of smiley faces that's disturbing, says Jenny Spinner. The assistant professor of English at St. Joseph's University says the e-mails she receives from freshmen lack any salutation or signature.

"They'll just assume, for some reason, that the e-mail will tell me who they are," Spinner said. "Sometimes I can't tell who BookGuy@aol is."

Cecile Kandl, associate professor of language and literature at Bucks County Community College, estimates that at least 70 percent of the e-mails she receives from new students have some element of text-speak.

"I think that students have now become so completely connected to texting that they really can't separate it," she said.

When some students receive about 1,500 texts a week - a must, says Temple University student Natalie Ramos-Castillo, because "not everyone has a laptop on them at all times" - a constant segue between the virtual world and the real world is required.

Eva Alkasov, now a Temple University junior, tries to fight the impulse in her own correspondence to teachers, although she knows text-speak sometimes leaked through when she was in high school.

"When I'm trying to say something to a professor in an e-mail and I want to make a joke or be a little lighthearted, there's a constant reaction to just put 'haha' at the end of it, but I want to be taken seriously, so I don't."

Rachel Mattos triple-checks her e-mails before hitting "send" to professors.

"I know how unprofessional it looks if text language sneaks in," said the St. Joseph's University English major.

Not only that, text-speak is often impossible to comprehend if you're one of the many adults who consider it a foreign language. (If you can't understand "i <3 u, ttyl" then you're one of them.)

"There's like millions of abbreviations because people make new variations daily. They just don't want to spell things," said Ramos-Castillo, who proofreads her e-mails before sending them to professors. "Because we know the context, we're able to decode it."

Like the other students, John Baxter, a student at Neumann University in Glen Mills, doesn't resort to texting shortcuts in his coursework. But Baxter takes it a step further; he won't even use texting in texts - unless the tricky location of g, h, and i on one key gets in the way. So "nite" or "lite" is OK.

That's the funny thing about the text-speak debate. While most professors say they receive text-speak in formal communications, students claim it's not as prevalent. The reason? Most people don't even realize they're doing it.

"We use texting so frequently that we forget when it's appropriate to use texting language and when it's not," Ramos-Castillo said.

They might, but their professors don't. They've seen everything - from a few dropped vowels to acronyms that look like they came straight out of a Nazi Enigma code machine. At the University of Pennsylvania, engineering professor Roch Guerin sees the occasional use of u instead of you, but not much else.

"My guess is that the idiosyncrasies of texting are primarily caused by the keyboard form factor, and when that is absent - you are typing using a full-size keyboard - those reflexes disappear and communication is back to normal," Guerin said.

Yet Charlie Groth, an assistant professor of language and literature at Bucks County Community College, has noticed these loosey-goosey sentences since the advent of e-mail. And texting has only made it worse.

Groth did note that some of the acronyms employed in modern-day texting were being used a half-century ago. Remember writing "SWAK" (Sealed with a kiss) on the back of an envelope?

"They're not new; they're recycled," Groth said.

Still, she wants her students to spell it out.

"I'll say, 'Guys, the word you is a three-letter word, whether you're talking about the personal pronoun, the fuzzy sheep, or the bush.' "

Professors routinely address lapses because, they say, their job is to prepare students to communicate to multiple audiences. As Copeland puts it, "The language of academics is standard English. I think students have to learn that distinction, and it might as well start with me."

Although he jokes that it takes him 20 minutes to thumb out a five-word text, Terence Gleeson says he gives students some leeway when it comes to text-speak, but not too much.

Like Elizabethan English, texting is "very much a language in flux," says the assistant professor of theater arts at Neumann University.

"There was a lot of license on Shakespeare's part to invent language. These kids may be at the vanguard of how our language will look in 50 years or 2,000 years. In a way, it makes more sense to spell things the way they're spelling them."

Gleeson allows students to use text-speak when they write scripts because he believes it mimics the sounds of speech better than written English does. He also doesn't mind when students use shortcuts in e-mails, but, like faculty members from other Philadelphia-area colleges, he makes it clear where the language liberties must stop. If a formal paper doesn't use English correctly, the grade will suffer.

"They also have to be able to send and receive text messages that conform to their social milieu," Gleeson said. "They have to be, in a sense, bilingual."

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Some Examples, With Translations

Text-speak:

Yo ima use u as a reference 4 dis job. tel em u dnt have the dates of when i workd jus tel em bout a yr.

Translation:

Yo, I'm going to use you as a reference for this job. Tell them you don't have the dates of when I worked. Just tell them about a year.

Text-speak:

i <3 u. ttyl

I love you. Talk to you later.

Text-speak:

Rehi s^ rugoin2 *$ 2moro

Translation:

Hi, again. What's up? Are you going to Starbucks tomorrow?

Text-speak:

we r @ Y. GTG

Translation: We are at the Y. Got to go.

Text-speak:

BRB ppl here, K?

Translation:

Be right back. People are here, OK?

Text-speak:

wym we're thru?

Translation:

What do you mean we're through?

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