Literacy in the Facebook Era - Waray Dictionary and Language ...

Fullmer 3
Texting and internet English, we conclude, have stripped all dignity from formal, standard
English. Our students don’t know how to spell, how to conjugate verbs, how to construct
grammatical sentences. Their vocabularies have shrunk to stone age-era hieroglyphics of smilies and
emoticons. Washington Post journalist Gene Weingarten typifies this feeling in his recent article,
opining that the English language is now officially dead: “It succumbed last month at the age of
1,617 after a long illness. It is survived by an ignominiously diminished form of itself.”
As a writer and lover of literature, I share Weingarten’s dismay. But I’m an also optimist. I
am not yet convinced English is dead or our students hopelessly illiterate, and this belief stems from
my own experience with Facebook.
Like many Facebook users, I began using the site while a student. I was in graduate school at
Boston College and the year was 2005. At first the site was a fun way to get to know classmates (i.e.,
goggle over candid pictures), to reconnect with childhood friends (a.k.a. internet stalk), to schedule
get-togethers, and to share all manner of information. As a result I found myself being more in
touch with global news and local events. I felt closer to my community. However, it was also evident
that the way I was reading and writing was changing—and perhaps most interesting, no one was
instructing me to change. The fundamental differences between printed text and hypertext were
causing me to adapt to the new medium.
Language is always evolving, but the internet and text messaging are doing more to shape
language, particularly English, and at a more accelerated rate, than ever before. Besides the statistics
above, anecdotal evidence supports Facebook’s impact on English language the Philippines: walk
into any of the dozen internet cafes crammed on Salazar Street in Tacloban City, just blocks away
from the Eastern Visayas State University. You will invariably find a bevy of students checking
Facebook (well, that, or playing the latest first-person shooter game). Peek over a student’s shoulder;
you might see him typing something like this: (Example 1) 2
nag daog kamo kakulop han basketball? :) nanlakat kami dayon kay late
na geap.
2 Translation: “did you win your basketball game yesterday? :) we went inside because we were also late.” This of course
displays a number of features of internet writing, including emoticons, lack of proper capitalization, unconventional
spelling, and most important for this discussion, a mixture of local language and English.