Now, IM a novel
While on a recent trip, I stumbled across Lauren Myracle’s novel, TTYL [laurenmyracle.com]. Written for and about teenaged girls, she uses their language - instant messages. The pages look like screen shots, complete with emoticons.
This reminded me of Hawaiian pidgin. When we were living in the islands in the early 90s, a young author submitted poetry written in this unique blend of English, Chinese, Tagalog, and Japanese. The reactions went from decrying the fall of civilization “as we know it” to embracing this expression and legitimizing this “new” language. Now, barely 10 years later, pidgin is considered a valid creole by many. (Creoles are pidgins that have had valid grammatical structure imposed upon them.)
IM slang is emerging as a pidgin, so a creole may not be far behind. Creoles normally emerge a full generation after the pidgin. The Internet clock may speed this transition.
Since teenagers always grow up, many move on to college and into the workforce. They expect to be able to IM their colleagues. Will their chosen language be
For precedents, consider that “cc” is often used as a verb and ASAP is pronounced as one word. Those of us who grew up with Tigger know that “TTFN” means ta-ta for now. Since some imglish is phonetic already (CU), they won’t be recognizable as imglish. Others (poof) will be more obvious for the indoctrinated and confusing for the out-crowd.
Sad to say, I’m not the first to use imglish to describe this phenomenon. The good folks over at Urban Dictionary beat me to it.
A novel written entirely in this pidgin is an interesting harbinger.