Is Text Really A Bad Thing?

[Mr Lee]

Over the almost 19 years I have known my wife the Cebuano seems to keep changing, yet I found it to be stable before cell phones, but now that texting and text abbreviations are a daily thing in almost everyones life here, it seems that much of what I learned has gone to waste because much of it seems to continually be in flux. The words are getting shortened and some words now have many abbreviation of the same word.

[tropicalwaste]

Cebuano is abbreviations everyone shortens a sentence down to a single word.. like Pila? = price, amount,quantity,number instead of :-how much is a sack of rice?how many months pregnant are you?how much in a sack?how many people?

[UZI]

Over the almost 19 years I have known my wife the Cebuano seems to keep changing, yet I found it to be stable before cell phones, but now that texting and text abbreviations are a daily thing in almost everyones life here, it seems that much of what I learned has gone to waste because much of it seems to continually be in flux. The words are getting shortened and some words now have many abbreviation of the same word. �:444: So should people even bother to try to learn the local language? Should someone make a standard for text abbreviations of Cebuano?�Boy this has become frustrating.� :444: :SugarwareZ-037: �I wonder if the people who live in areas where Tagalog is the main language are also seeing this trend?

Lee,It is becoming such a big issue that the Department of Education is on the offensive. This from GMA news

As it begins the yearly cleanup to prepare schools for the start of School Year 2010-2011, the Department of Education is also seeking to cleanse school-age Filipinos of the “jejemon" mentality.DepEd Secretary Mona Valisno strongly “discouraged" young Filipinos from using “jejemon" spelling and grammar, especially in popular communication platforms such as text messaging.She said that communicating in “jejemon" might cause deterioration of young Filipino students’ language skills.The “jejemon" phenomenon involves the use of different spellings of common words, and is noticeable not only in text messaging but also in social networking sites.While Valisno acknowledged some cell phone users alter the spelling of long words to meet the 160-character limit of text messages, she still encouraged young Filipinos to send texts with properly spelled words.Jejemon's etymology was supposed to have started from online users' penchant to type in "hehehe" as "jejeje", either because "Jeje" is derived from Spanish, whose speakers denote the interjection as laughter, or because the letters "h" and "j" are beside each other, and that it is appended by "-mon" that came from the Japanese anime Pokémon, with "-mon" meant as "monster," hence "jeje monsters."Jejemon is a pop culture phenomenon in the Philippines. Jejemons are defined by Urban Dictionary as those "who has managed to subvert the English language to the point of incomprehensibility and online lynch squads." — LBG, GMANews.TV

Teenagers have always had their own language but never to the point that it is taking over the day to day spelling & language.Uzi.

[Travis]

it even has me forgetting how to spell because cuz I keep getting into the habit of cutting it short I need to go back to school

[Demeter]

Cutting words short is not a problem, I guess, as long as you still understand the message being conveyed. Just don't try learning the JEJEMON way of texting, hahahahaha....