Texting has become a widely used communication system within our generation. Is it accepted? Even now when I'm typing the word 'texting', it is underlined in red, claiming to not be in our universal dictionary. I have no doubt many linguists have started dissecting and analyzing the global phenomenon known as texting, eager to understand the depths of this recent happening.

Both widely known linguists, John McWhorter and David Crystal have distinctive theories the phenomenon Crystal has labelled as Textspeak. Here we'll discuss textspeak, comparing both McWhorter and Crystal's theories.

How did textspeak come to life? Texting is 'fingered speech'. McWhorter states that language is speech and that writing is 'a kind of artifice'. He then goes on and discusses the history of language. In distant era, it was common for people to speak like they were writing. It was formal and structured and perfectly natural at that time. But, could we write like we speak? At that time, no. We were limited in a 'material, mechanical sense' and thus communication was limited. However, as the new dawn of mobiles came along, he concludes that "Once you have things in your pocket that can receive that message, then you have the conditions that allow that we can write like we speak. And that's where texting comes in." So texting had initiated to finally allow humanity to write how we speak.

Crystal, on the other hand, finds that we have adapted our communication to suit our growing and new found demands. He claims that our 'linguistic creativity' is evolving and thus the need for a new system was in place. He suggests that our new technology has created a new medium for language which is why is grabbed soo much attention. However, with the constraints of a small-screen, the result was 'one of the most idiosyncratic varieties in the history of language'. Both McWhorter and Crystal conclude that technology as new medium has aided in evolving a new language. However, while Crystal suggests that this is an evolutionary extension to our language, McWhorter finds this new phenomenon as an entirely new language created by the young generation.

Who knows, maybe one day we'll see textspeak in Google Translate.