An interesting thought occurred to me while drying myself after my bath last night o the subject of language. I was going over the relationship between langue (written language) and parole (spoken language). As a voca user, langue is more closely related to parole simply because, when out and about, I have to type all my utterances. It seems to me that langue has evolved.

However, this is not in the most obvious sense. Most people think evolution just change over time, and they would be correct, but that is only one type of evolution the broadest. There are various mechanisms through which animals evolve: one, I believe, is called specialisation. Say I had a group of primates: it’s getting rather large so part of the group splits off to find new food. Say they go to a part of the wood with trees with fruit with hard rind. Over time, through natural selection, they adapt to possess stronger hands which can tear through the rind. Thus, while remaining primates, they have developed into a new species.

I believe we can observe this in language today. Of course languages change – Germanic to old English, old English to middle English, etc. thus we can observe linguistic evolution in the broad, macro sense. Yet I believe we can observe it in the sense of the primate example too, in the area of electronic communications. Of course, I refer only to langue – parole has continued to change at it’s standard rate. The written word seems to be developing a new subspecies, but isn’t in itself changing. We still use traditional forms of writing – syntax, spelling etc – to compose documents, but with the advent of electronic forms of communication, a new subspecies or sublangue has developed. This is not, however, a sublanguage, for the way we pronounce words has not changed.

Just as with our primate example, there is a definite cause for this. today, in text messaging, msn, and indeed on machines like my lightwriter, there is a need to write quickly. Hence, the phrase ‘good to see you’ becomes ‘good 2cu’. The way in which we pronounce this phrase verbally hasn’t changed, but the way in which we write It in texting has. Certain letters, such as C U and R, have ‘evolved’ to become not only letters but hieroglyphs, and nor represent words. Of course, one must mention that this seems to bear out de Sesseur’s statement that the relationship between sign and signified is arbitrary, and therefore subject to change.

This process is not purely random, so the purely Darwinian paradigm does not strictly apply. Only certain letters, that is, those which are pronounced like words, have been modified – a process which is not arbitrary. However, it is interesting to note how closely natural speciesisation resembles the evolution of texting. I therefore see it as natural, and would ask those who decry texting as something akin to sacrilege, as I once did, not to despair too much.