Just struck me that typing with awkward abbreviations (like ‘what r u doing’) is like a textual pidgin for older people who learned typing late in life while effective emoji use and internet abbreviations like brb ngl etc are a proper creole
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If an abbreviation is phonetic like u, r, 2, gr8, it is on the pidgin side. If it’s an internet native acronym like wtf it is on the creole side
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Beyond the creole stage there’s true internet dialects like drilspeak or that thing zoomers do with deliberately weird capitalization
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Feeling very smug about this insight 😎
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Another sign is getting spaces around punctuation wrong,like this. Or like this. Double space after periods is a typewriter-era hangover. There’s also spaces before periods . Like this. If you were like 60+ when you first typed, these are likely pidginisms.
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I used to get spaces wrong initially in like 1994. I learned to program in the 80s but only learned to type properly in the mid 90s, since I didn’t need word processing until then. I’m from handwritten homework generation. Played with WordStar/WordPerfect but didn’t need them.
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Learned to type text properly on Usenet and LaTeX. Interesting that programming and command line usage on DOS in the 80s didn’t require you to know good text typing style, since you didn’t need to do it. It was the internet that made text typing a basic literacy skill.
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I totally get the distinction you’re trying to make but be careful with the examples you choose. Some abbrevs do not fall cleanly into one camp or another.
“r u” and “brb” both were common in IM contexts in the late 90s. Maybe typing skill drove that, but why wasn’t it creole?
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They were the expressios of a younger generation, just 20 years ago.
In a sense thumb-based input devices just made everyone a “slow typer”.
In general, abbrevs don’t really express a new range of concepts or meanings, the way that emojis do. Definitely agree emojis are creole
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