Textisms, texting, and spelling in Spanish

• Published in: Lingua Vol. 201; pp. 92 - 101
• Main Authors: Gómez-Camacho, Alejandro, Hunt-Gómez, Coral I., Valverde-Macías, Andrés
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Amsterdam Elsevier B.V 01.01.2018; Elsevier Science Ltd
• Subjects: College students; Digital communication; Digital transmission; Grapheme phoneme correspondence; Language usage; Literacy; Phonemes; Phonetics; Spanish; Spanish language; Spelling; Text messaging; Textisms; Writing; Digital communication; Spanish; Spelling; Textisms; Text messaging
• ISSN: 0024-3841; 1872-6135
• DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2017.09.004

•Standard and digital norms coexist in Spanish in educated writers.•Undergraduates consider textisms a challenge to academic writing rules and literacy.•Textisms that modify the standard practice are perceived as a threat.•Textisms that include multimodal elements are generally accepted.•Digital usage could affect the evolution of Spanish standard normative writing. This study examines undergraduates’ perception of usage in smartphone text message and their relationship with the process of learning Spanish spelling. The aim is to establish whether subjects who have become competent language users in a digital environment accept the use of textisms and whether these textisms are perceived differently depending on their phonetic, lexical, and multimodal features. A total of 388 undergraduates from the Faculty of Education Science of the University of Seville participated in a non-experimental study of a descriptive type based on surveys. The data showed that both standard Spanish writing and digital usage coexisted harmoniously in participants’ texts. However, a clear difference was established between textisms that modified Spanish writing rules and those that incorporated new elements not included in standard writing. Whereas textisms which modified the relationship between phonemes and graphemes were considered a challenge to standard writing as well as to academic literacy among young students (12–16), lexical textisms, emoticons, images, and videos were not considered harmful to standard Spanish. The study suggested that evolution of the writing rules set by the Spanish Academy could be influenced by the digital writing habits of young students.