While it's true that spelling and grammar can change, that doesn't necessarily mean that they will.

We are well past the conception of the English language, the point where it stopped being a corrupted mishmash of a half-dozen intermixed languages and became a language in it's own right. Nor are we in the Shakespearean era, where a single man could sign his name in twelve different ways and still be recognized as the same person.

The English language today has hundreds of years of standardization, which I think has only been strengthened by the availability of relevant technology. What we have has been formed, tried, tested, and kept because it was effective. The language has been, for the most part, debugged, and major changes - in my opinion - are unlikely.

Roman monuments - the ones carved in stone - had no punctuation. Why? Because when it takes you a half an hour to carve any given punctuation mark, it's not really worth the effort.

Documents from the age of the printing press had both punctuation and lowercase letters because written communication was primarily done by hand. large numbers of identical documents could be produced, but all the originals were done by hand. What you didn't see a lot of were italics, because italics were expensive - you had to pay for an extra set of letters in order to have them in your document. Expense equals rarity, so italics were only added when something was really, really important.

These days, with word processors and laser printers, italics are commonplace; so common, in fact, that they have effectively replaced quotation marks for internal dialogue. Someone - I don't know who - got tired of pointing out that half the quoted dialogue in his book was internal and went Hey, what if I use a different format to indicate internal dialogue? Well, it worked. In fact, it worked so well that it's hard to find a novel that doesn't use italics to indicate internal dialogue.

Ease creates complexity, and complexity requires structure.

So then why isn't chatspeak more complex than the written word, since it's easier? Except that it's not, because chatspeak isn't the use of the written word to convey information, chatspeak is the art of using the written word as verbal conversation. It's an attempt to simulate the spontaneity of the spoken word in written form, and the interfaces used to do so are not really designed for it.

Chatspeak isn't really the next step in the evolution of the English language it's an entirely new facet of the language, built for a medium that the world has no precedent for. I suspect that as interfaces become more intuitive, the complexity of chatspeak will come closer to that of the written word, rather than vice-versa.

Or at least I hope it will.

I'm going to be even more difficult here and start drawing lines between evolution of words and evolution of structure.

As far as changes in the structure of language- grammar and syntax, or constructions like you mentioned with your text message as an example- yeah, I think you're right. We learn the structure of our language in a certain way, and changing it really does affect the meaning of what we read and/or hear. Sometimes the change can be effective- for example, in a text message it isn't really efficient to type out a full sentence with capitalization and articles and things- but I agree with you that it does depend on the context. "Bought small carrotbag" is appropriate and effective in a text message; it wouldn't be in a written report to your boss.

(Unrelated: "carrotbag" is my new favorite word ever.)

Which brings me to my other point- change and evolution of individual words, in my personal opinion, is awesome. I'm going to hold up Shakespeare as an example here, because Shakespeare is my go-to example for everything. Shakespeare invented squillions of new words and phrases, stuck words together, back-constructed words, stuck on prefixes and suffixes and what-have-you, and he could do that because he was writing at a time when English was a) in a state of rapid change and expansion, due to a new medium (i.e. secular theatre, also the printing press), and b) not yet standardized by things like dictionaries.

I would argue that we're in a similar situation now. The advent of the internet and text-messaging and other such new technology has created a space for language to grow and change. The new language constructions that come out of it aren't standardized yet- yes, there are things like UrbanDictionary and so forth, but they're mostly descriptive rather than prescriptive, and I don't consider them particularly authoritative. I think, until our frame of thought catches up with our technology, the language of the internet changes too fast to standardize, so we're looking at considerable linguistic shift for some time yet. And in a lot of cases, I don't think it's a bad thing at all.

That fact that language changes is a form of evolution. Evolution means slow change/gradual development. It doesn't just apply to biological systems.

I can probably better tell you about my own experience with my own native tongue. In Dutch there are a few very common grammatical spelling errors (in translation: saying 'them' rather than 'they'; saying 'bigger as' rather than 'bigger than'; saying 'hele' (adjective) instead of 'heel' (adverb) (can't translate this, but suffice to say that in one particular case people use an adjective where they should use an adverb) ; adding spacing between the different parts of a compound noun (this is called English disease); and not adding spaces after 'te' or 'ten' when they are needed, thus using a different word than meant.)

I once took part in a survey by a research institution about such errors. The questions were: do you come across this error? Do you find it acceptable Dutch? If not, do you think it will become acceptable Dutch? When?

In all these cases the reader or listener probably still knows what the other person is meaning to say. Only language purist grind their teeth.

But language doesn't evolve because 'we just like to text this way: it's easy,' it evolves because the parties involved don't see any change in meaning or loss of information.

Actually, this is exactly why language evolves. It starts with something else being easier to say and because no meaning is lost, the difference becomes acceptable and perhaps at some time the new standard. If there was no reason to say things differently, language would not change/evolve.

Especially the sociolinguistics professors. I spent most of my time at uni listening to the debates. I think the general consensus is that you could argue it both ways, which is the Professional Academic way of saying that neither side has a strong enough argument to completely undercut the other, so they're backing off before they can be humiliated. It's amusing ;)

But as for me personally, I agree with Neshomeh.

Written English and spoken English are two different things. I would just like to state this before we talk about the topic proper. When you write "bought small carrotbag," it might seem clear to your mom, but if you spoke that same exact statement without context, it would sound completely different. Writing and talking are two different things, and I think that text talk has very little effect on spoken English aside from reading those texts out loud and pronouncing the abbrevs.

That being said, I agree that evolution is not the right word for what your cousin described. New words are being created all the time. My word processor recognizes the word "Pokemon," which probably wouldn't have happened fifteen years ago. But that's not evolution. It's just change. I wouldn't even go that far with text talk, because it is essentially just abbreviations. Like you said, Aster, it's all in the context. But languages don't evolve. They change and warp and make new dialects and such. You should watch My Fair Lady sometime. It's one of my favorite movies ever.

By which I mean standard usage vs. nonstandard usage.

Something that we all can generally accept, I think, is that there IS a time and a place for informal, colloquial, slang language. We use shortcuts when talking to our friends because, as Aster points out, no meaning is lost in that context. Same goes for texting, much as it galls me.

However! There is also a time and a place for standard usage. Such times and places include schoolwork, talking to people who you'd like to impress with your intelligence, and writing that you plan to show to strangers. In essence, any time you can't afford to be misunderstood.

Can what is considered standard change? Sure. But only in ways that improve the language's function. Maybe saying "bought small carrotbag" doesn't lose any meaning in that instance, but that became standard, if all grammar converted to such a simplistic, bare-bones functional style, what would we lose overall? Shall we do away with all pronouns and rely on context to tell who the subject is because it's quicker? We could probably get away with getting rid of articles--plenty of other languages get by without them--but what about "of"?

It might be an interesting experiment to try and get through a day without saying or writing "of." It can probably be done... but if you're feeling really adventurous, get rid of--no, wait--stop using some other prepositions, too. See how far cutting these little words gets you before you can't say anything useful anymore.

I could go on and on (and probably will come back later), but I have to work, so I'll just leave these suggestions for further study:

* George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four
* Noah Webster

~Neshomeh