She’s a gr8 friend and I spk 2 her everyday,” wrote Maya, a student of Florence Public School, when asked to write an essay on ‘Your best friend’. Her teacher was horrified: Has the web-language of the student spilled over from the chatrooms to the classrooms? Maya says that she was in a hurry to finish the test on time and hadn’t noticed what she had written. That had been the teacher’s fear too: have the youngsters become so used to writing ‘u’ instead of ‘you’ and ‘4’ for ‘for’, ignoring the capitalisation, omitting punctuation, vowels and articles?
Can chatting on the internet or messaging frequently over mobile phones impair your language skills?

Shakuntala, a teacher in Daffodils English School feels there might be occasional ins-tances, but the students get the message when she deducts marks for such lapses.
A language evolves to reflect changes in society and SMS is the lingua franca of a generation in a hurry. The multiple-letter keys and a small screen on the mobile do not limit their communication; they have made people more imaginative instead.  A slew of cryptic acronyms and abbreviations have appeared and people like Maya can type them at the speed of thought.
Instant Messaging English or IMISH has three characteristics — the omission of vowels to shorten words, the use of acronyms and shortening words such as using ‘r’ in the place of ‘are’. This new, rapid-fire communication over cellular networks has produced its own additions to the staid Concise Oxford Dictionary. Brb (be right back), gr8 (great), HAND (have a nice day), cul8r (see you later) and ruok (are you OK) and the abbreviation ‘tx’ for thanks have all been admitted to its hallowed pages. You might ROTFL (roll-on-the-floor-laughing) or simply lol (laugh out loud) if you know these two words have found their way into the New Oxford Dictionary of English. It is perfectly likely that English will change beyond measure in the future and the current form of English will be as unintelligible to people then, as Shakespearean English is for the common man today.
But aren’t these alphabetic clusters indicative of the laziness of today’s generation? Manjunatha, a lecturer in Adarsha Vidya Sangh College, feels that it’s a sign of the creativity of the younger generation. “Look how people create such wonderful emoticons with just a couple of keystrokes. They are not lazy, they are creative.” Emoticons are a tool to tell the readers whether the writer is serious, kidding, having fun or getting angry. So if you want to say that you were only kidding, you could type :-), or if you are upset you can sho-w it through :-( but if you want to depict them as wearing glasses, use B-) and B-(.
Manjunatha also feels that communication and language skills have actually improved with the internet. “Basically the students chat more, be it through the net or email or mobile. So they write more, express more and somewhere the communication skills improve and the fear of English goes away,” he says.