Der gute Einstieg

It might not be anything out of the ordinary in these post-Schengen days, but living close to an international border still gives me goosepimples. Borders are nothing more than imaginary lines snaking across the landscape, but they divide communities, which - quite literally - live within spitting distance of each other: they speak different languages, watch different TV programmes and pay their taxes to different governments, just to name a few of the telltale signs. Pulled in opposite directions, their backs turned to each other, their focus is directed on everyday events in their own backyards.

The 44 is a cross-border bus service that links Heerlen in the Netherlands with Aachen in Germany. Journeys between the two conurbations are operated respectively by the bus companies Veolia and AachenerStraßenbahn und Energieversorgungs-AG (ASEAG). For most people who travel on it, it provides a convenient way of getting from A to B. For others, like me - also a regular traveller - it offers an intriguing insight into some of the  idiosyncrasies of the two cultures that straddle the border between Germany and the Netherlands.

The bus service that runs between Heerlen NS and Hauptbahnhof Aachen has been part of my life for the best part of ten years. When I started teaching at the Volkshochschule (VHS) in 2004, the 44 provided an ideal door-to-door service from my home in Heerlen into the centre of Aachen.

ASEAG designates the route a Schnellbuslinie, which means it functions as an ‘express’ service designed to connect transport nodes quickly by stopping at fewer stops. When the bus enters Dutch territory this becomes a misnomer: whilst it takes just 20 minutes for the 44 to cover the 10 or so kilometres from the centre of Aachen to the border at De Locht - stopping only at Laurensberg, Richterich and Horbach – when it arrives in the Netherlands it reverts to a Bummelbus, covering the last 7.2 kilometres from the border to Heerlen in just under half an hour.

The 44 carries an omnifarious mix of travellers, from the ubiquitous commuters and schoolchildren, to drug-tourists, night-clubbers, football fans, shoppers and English teachers. The route is plied by an alternating sequence of buses - sometimes articulated, but mainly rigid-bodied - operated by Veolia and ASEAG.

After leaving the bus station in Heerlen, the 44 follows a slow, circuitous, round-the-houses route as it labours through the neighbourhoods of Heesberg, Heerlerbaan and Spekholzerheide to the border. Take heed not to step aboard when school’s out or on match days when it’s standing room only. Once you’ve passed Parkstad Stadion, the home of Roda Kerkrade FC, and you arrive at Gracht, the bus will have set down most of its Dutch passengers. In fact, in both directions, few passengers on the 44 ever cross the border.

Since effectuation of the Schengen treaty, the border post at De Locht has no longer been manned by guards. More recently the bus has been an attraction for a special breed of tourist taking advantage of more relaxed narcotics laws in the Netherlands. Spot checks are frequently carried out here by the Bundesgrenzpolizei. More than once, travelling innocently with a satchel full of English course books, I’ve been asked “Haben Sie Waffen oder Drogen?”, and it’s not unusual to see suspected drug carriers being pulled off the bus for questioning. Drugs policy in the Netherlands may have been tightened in recent years, but as long as coffee shops locate provocatively close to the border, drug tourism will continue to be a thorn in the side for the German authorities. 

On Friday and Saturday nights, the bus can fill up with revellers travelling in the opposite direction on their way to fleshpots just across the border in the Netherlands. A lot of ‘preloading’ goes on at the back of the bus on the way from Aachen. Drivers are relieved when the bus disgorges its boisterous load, leaving only the sound of empty bottles and cans rolling around the floor of the deserted bus in their ears.

Across the border into Germany, between De Locht and Horbach, the countryside opens out affording wide vistas and huge skies. It has the isolated feel of no-man’s-land. One cold and windy March evening, during a bus strike I came off my bike here, landing with a thud on my forehead. Fortunately, I survived, but it was a lonely place to come a cropper and none of the passing traffic stopped to help.

Beyond Horbach, the first (or last) village in Germany the road crosses a line of dragon’s teeth which were put in place on the orders of Hitler in 1936. A major landmark along this part of the route, they formed part of the Westwall, or Siegfried Line, which was built to defend the western approaches to Germany. These pyramid-shaped concrete blocks embedded in the ground served as tank traps to deter enemy attack. In fact, by the end of the war, specialist engineers were able to dispose of them so quickly they had become more or less redundant. Due to their huge numbers and their durable construction however, many thousands of these blocks of concrete can still be seen today in places like Horbach.

Richterich, the next village, has long been subsumed into the Aachen urban sprawl. Here the bus now fills up with German commuters. Because we are now on the ‘express’ part of the route, we are soon within sight of the Ponttor, one of the four major gates that guarded over Reichstadt Aachen from the middle ages onwards. Beyond are the delights of the Pontstrasse, a popular entertainment district with a profusion of bars and restaurants catering to Aachen’s huge student population.

The busiest stop in town is the Bushof, the city’s main bus station. In the hurly-burly of a weekday rush-hour or on dark December weekends when Aachen holds its Christmas market, long queues can be expected – that’s if you’re English like me. But oddly, for a country which prides itself on being ‘ordentlich’, waiting as they do at pedestrian crossings until the lights turn green and sticking fastidiously to speed limits on motorways, ‘queuing’ is not a word in a German’s vocabulary. Climbing aboard a bus at rush-hour is a free-for-all so make sure you have plenty of elbow room when you board. At least during Advent, ASEAG has the foresight to put on bendy buses, when they fill up with hoards of returning Limburgers tipsy on Glühwein and replete with shopping.

After the backcountry-ism of the journey so far, the terminus of the 44 at the Hauptbahnof, the city’s main station, comes somewhat as a relief for those with a more outward-looking mentality. With its Jugendstil architecture, its high-speed connections and its selection of international magazines and newspapers in the concourse bookshop, it has all the trappings of a main line station, and not without reason. There has been a railway station in Aachen since 1841 when the Rheinische Eisenbahngesellschaft opened a line that was later extended to the port of Antwerp (the Belgian border being only 7 kilometres away). The Deutsche Bahn classifies Aachen Hbf as a Category 2 station, which means that it functions as an important junction for long-distance traffic. Both Cologne and Liège (B) are less than an hour away, and you can be in Frankfurt within two. Brussels, Paris and London can all be reached within half a day. Needless to say there’s also a local line that links Aachen with Heerlen.

Thank goodness that somewhere on this bus route, there is a place that offers a wider window on the world.

See also: Living on the Edge

Photo credit 

In praise of the passive

Politicians give it a bad name. Business tycoons have a similar proclivity. Even church leaders aren't averse to doing it. In fact, anyone who wants to shirk their responsibilities is helping to discredit the passive voice.

US President Reagan used the phrase “mistakes were made” when describing the Iran-Contra affair in 1986. In the phone-hacking scandal which came to prominence in the UK in 2011, part of Rupert Murdoch’s apology for the serious wrongdoings committed by his newspapers, included the words, “We are sorry for the hurt suffered by the individuals affected”. In 2006, Pope Benedict was accused of ducking out of a full apology when he said, “I am deeply sorry for the reactions in some countries to a few passages of my address [in a speech he gave in Germany] ... which were considered offensive to the sensibility of Muslims.”

Bizarrely, in 2011 Liam Fox, the defence minister in the UK coalition government, in evading a full and complete admission of guilt for a breach of office for which he had to resign, used a double passive: “The ministerial code has been found to be breached”.

What strikes the reader of course, is that the individuals or organisations making the mistakes, inflicting the hurt, causing the offence or breaching the code are not specified by name. And it’s precisely because of statements like these, which lack the action of an agent and thus create an impression that the buck is being passed, that the passive voice gets a bad press.

Modern style guides tell us to avoid using the passive whenever we write. Some advisers treat it as a grammatical pariah, advising us to eliminate the passive voice wherever possible.
Here are just a few of the reasons they advise us not to use the passive. 
Always write so that the reader knows who the actor is
Passive language can sound impersonal and bureaucratic
Avoid using passive verbs as they result in a vague, over-formal tone
The passive voice is rarely valuable
An active sentence is short and to the point, a passive one requires more words and ends up saying something less clearly
And who has not, for instance, seen the words “Passive Voice (consider revising)”, flash up on their spelling and grammar checker? It has, as it were, become gospel truth.

So, with so many people wanting to ditch the passive, does it have a future? The answer is probably yes, and with good reason. It has its legitimate uses. Like the active voice, the passive voice has been with us for time immemorial and is not likely to go away for a while yet. After all, even those who are most vehemently advocating its demise are using it – and a lot of the time.

George Orwell, amongst others, was disparaging of the passive. In his essay ‘Politics and the English Language’ (1946), he wrote, “Never use the passive where you can use the active”. Professor Geoff Pullum*, a linguist who was the co-author of ‘The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language’ (2002) and who frequently writes in defence of the passive, calculated that in Orwell's essay alone, 26% of transitive verbs used were in the passive voice. For a typical prose, such as a newspaper article, this is around 13%. Orwell is just one example of a writer who passes judgment on the passive, whilst actually making excessive use of it.

The main arguments against the passive seem to be that it impersonalises the language, because often we don’t know who the agent is. The result is formal, vague, stilted and verbose. But is this actually the case?

Most style guides which advise against its use, invariably quote bad examples of the passive. They try to prove their point by fabricating the examples themselves so that it becomes blindingly obvious an active sentence is better. For example:

I enjoyed the film (active) and The film was enjoyed (by me).

The student had to rewrite the essay (active) and The essay had to be rewritten by the student (passive).

It is perfectly legitimate (and proper) to use the passive. For example, in situations where the agent is unknown or irrelevant. If you don’t know who is responsible for an action, then a passive construction is just as useful as an active one, if not better (unless you are being deliberately misleading). In fact, where the object (receiver) of the action is more important than the subject (agent) of the sentence, then a passive sentence is the most obvious choice.

Take the following examples of passive structures from a newspaper report today (about snowstorms hitting Britain) and try reconstructing them into the active. Ask yourself if they would be an improvement: 
The snow and ice is expected to cause continued problems on the UK's transport network. 
The severe weather is also thought to have led to the death of a woman in Cornwall. 
Many sports fixtures, including Northern Ireland's World Cup qualifier against Russia and two race meetings, were called off on Saturday.

In each of the sentences, the agents – i.e. those who expect, those who think, and those who call off – are not known, neither are they relevant within the context. In fact, in the last example, multiple agents are involved and you would be hard pressed to attempt to mention them all in an active sentence, let alone identify them. And, more to the point, you could hardly say the sentences were clumsily written or difficult to understand.

It is ironic that many universities produce style guides admonishing use of the passive, not least because academic and scientific writing demands use of agentless texts using the passive. In fact, there is a conscious choice to ignore use of the 1st person singular or plural in research papers, as this might affect the objectivity of the experiment.
The sodium hydroxide was dissolved in water. This solution was then titrated with hydrochloric acid.
Sentences like these leave the reader in no real doubt that it was the scientist who was doing the dissolving and the titrating. The passive voice places the emphasis on the experiment rather than the analyst. Use of the passive does not make it any less legible and the opening paragraphs of a scientific paper will usually make it obvious who the agent (scientist) was.

More than often it is not the passive voice which is at fault, as is often claimed, but sloppy use of the language. Sloppiness is not limited solely to use of the passive however. It may range from acronyms, ostentatious wordage and jargon which is deliberately used to confuse us, to bad spelling, punctuation and grammar (including, for instance, poor use of the active voice). Ultimately, it is about clarity and readability and the passive voice can be used as effectively as any other medium of language to achieve this.

* Geoff Pullum (and others) have written some interesting articles on the use of the passive. This link provides a good starting point. 

Olive Davies (néé Gillings) 1923 - 2013

Before I left for England on the day my mother died, a good friend of mine emailed me with their condolences and gave me some advice. They suggested I take a brief time-out from my busy schedule, go into the garden, light a cigarette and remember my mum. Well, I don’t smoke nowadays , but it seemed like a good piece of advice, even without the cigarette. So here I am, in my imaginary garden, with my imaginary cigarette.

Of course, I’d like to remember mum, not as she was in her final years, but as she was in her prime. 

When I was born, the youngest of three brothers, my mum was still a young woman at 33.
We grew up in a warm and loving environment and, perhaps without fully appreciating it at the time, had happy childhoods. That was mostly due to mum and dad. Dad went out to work, mum stayed at home and looked after our daily needs. They sheltered us from the grim realities of life, but never put us on a leash. We were allowed to develop our own interests and no pressure was applied to do something with our lives we didn’t want to do.

As a family living in Chorlton-cum-Hardy, Manchester, we spent happy times together, but perhaps never more so than when we went on holiday.
As young children we would spend hours building sandcastles or playing cricket on the beach at Scarborough, mum’s home town, where we’d stay with grandma and grandpa Gillings.
Another Davies family haunt - from way back - was Colwyn Bay, where for many years we rented a cottage, whose main asset, as far as we were concerned, was that it backed on to the main London to Holyhead line. Every time we heard a Jubilee, Royal Scot or Britannia approaching, we would dash upstairs to watch it pass. What could have been better for a kid growing up in the Sixties?
Later, when we bought a car, we’d venture further afield and spend holidays in Scotland. It was the peace and tranquillity away from urban life in Manchester my mum and dad were seeking – and they certainly found it for us.

My mum enjoyed walks in the countryside as much as anyone. She was not necessarily bold or adventurous, she just loved the beauty of the seasons, the countryside and the flowers and birds around her. Walks were all part and parcel of a good holiday and by the time I was 12, as a family, we could count Snowdon and Ben Nevis amongst our conquests. I’m sure it’s from my mum that I gained a passion for walking.

The holidays together didn’t end when we’d all left home and started our own families. In retirement, my mum & dad fulfilled one of their dreams by moving to Thornton Dale in North Yorkshire. We all loved going to ‘Harefield’. And the happy holidays theme was passed down to another generation. I’m sure all the grandchildren have fond memories of playing games, feeding the ducks, going to Wardills, tobogganing down Miller’s Hill or enjoying an ice-cream from Balderson’s when they stayed with grandpa and grandma in Thornton Dale.

The 15 years they spent there were golden years for my mum and dad. My mum kept a diary during those years. In fact it was only in 2003 – at the age of 80 – that she gave up writing. Each entry would start with a report on the weather that day. In between the trivialities of everyday life, she would write about her painting class (she was a modest but talented water-colour painter), her gardening endeavours, the walks in and around the village and quite often about the birds she had seen that day. The entries invariably ended with the words, ‘Thank you Lord for today’.

When her memory started to play tricks on her in the last decade, in between bouts of lucidity and disorientation, she would often imagine herself going back to ‘Harefield’. Even when she started to dote, she would make it abundantly clear how much she missed Thornton Dale.

Mum can look back on a good life. She had a happy marriage in a happy household. She was unassuming, not prone to any great socialising, and was perhaps happiest out walking with dad, in the garden or engrossed in her painting and, of course, being with the family. And if her mental health hadn’t eventually failed her, she would have been able to appreciate her grandchildren and great-grandchildren growing up a great deal more, but I’m sure I can say on her behalf that she’d be proud of what she leaves behind.

Olive Davies (néé Gillings)
Born Scarborough, 7 September 1923
Died Hull, 31 January 2013
  
Text given as an appreciation at my mum's funeral on 12 February 2013 

The Bigger Picture

The East Riding of Yorkshire is considered by many as a provincial backwater. This ‘riding’ is the least well known of the three traditional constituent parts of the old county of Yorkshire. Whereas the West Riding has the lion's share of the population (with the Leeds-Bradford and Sheffield conurbations), and the North Riding has the greatest preponderance of tourist attractions (including the Yorkshire Dales and North Yorks Moors national parks), the East Riding is thinly populated and geographically off the beaten track. Apart from the port of Hull and the resorts of Bridlington and Filey, for many, the East Riding is a blind spot on the map of northern England. But all of a sudden, things are changing.   

VHEY is a cryptic acronym for the organisation which is responsible for promoting tourism in the region. In fact, visithullandeastyorkshire.com is the equally implausible website address. Geographically, the territory that the VHEY tourist body represents roughly equates to the now defunct East Riding of Yorkshire (which was swallowed up by newly created North Yorkshire and Humberside regions in the local government reorganisation of 1974). It occupies an irregular triangle delineated by an imaginary line which joins up York, Hull, Spurn Head, Bridlington, Scarborough and York. The main geomorphological feature are the Yorkshire Wolds, which (for my Dutch readers) are not dissimilar to the undulating ‘uplands’ of South Limburg. The Yorkshire Wolds mark the most northerly limits of chalk in Britain and form a largely homogeneous region of rolling hills, with the Vale of Pickering situated to the north and the low-lying district of Holderness to the south.

VHEY is now producing lavishly printed brochures promoting the region as one which ‘could have been made for cycling, walking, picnics and exploring’. However, the boost to the tourist trade that VHEY is anticipating is not the result of a dream marketing campaign, but more indirectly due to the efforts of one of Yorkshire’s famous sons, David Hockney.

Though born (1937) and educated in Bradford, as an artist, Hockney is most commonly associated with California. It is his stylised and straightforward acrylics of the Californian landscape and his so-called swimming pool paintings for which he is best known. Throughout his 60-year career, he has also experimented widely with new technologies, for example, photographic landscape composites as an ‘investigation of cubism’. Photocopiers, fax machines and – more recently – the iPad have featured amongst his chosen media.

For much of the last 15 years however - many would say in the twilight of his career – Hockney has been capturing images of the East Riding on canvas, whilst also embracing the opportunities provided by digital technology in this quest. Video installations are the latest addition to this.

Working from a studio in Bridlington, a port and seaside resort which lies on the eastern edge of the Wolds, Hockney has been producing monumental landscape paintings of various locations in the Wolds, returning at various points throughout the year to provide immense ‘snapshots’ of the four seasons. Amongst his most popular locations are Woldgate and Thixendale, but also the village of Bigger, which – as a play on words – was used as the title of his most recent exhibition of the project, The Bigger Picture.

Hockney was invited to stage an exhibition of these works – which in any other mortal’s book would represent a lifetime’s work, so copious is his output -  at the RoyalAcademy in London in 2012, where it attracted record sell-out audiences. The exhibition has since been taken on tour to Bilbao (Guggenheim) and Cologne (Ludwig Museum).

No wonder the popularity of Hockney’s fascinating works, which feature the sweeping vistas, the majestic skyscapes and the rolling hillsides that predominate this rural backwater have not only been attracting art-lovers, but also the attention of marketing people keen to expand tourism in the region.

The exhibition runs in Cologne until 3 February 2013.

See also: 
Spot the Difference  
Woldgate  

Daylight musings

Who said you can’t cram more than 24 hours into one day? Last Saturday I travelled to England from home and had a whole 2 hours extra. Now if you’re wondering why, there’s a perfectly logical reason. Firstly, the UK runs 1 hour behind Central European Time; and secondly, the last full weekend of October marks the end of Summer Time when the clocks get put back.

At the end of August, people are already talking about the ‘nights drawing in’, but by November we’re in completely new territory. Suddenly it’s getting dark at 5 in the afternoon and there’s still a month and a half to go before sunset times even start to creep upwards again. Unless you decide to move south of the Equator, there’s not a lot you can do to beat the gloom. Just grin and bear it as best as you can until the earth’s axis starts titling in ‘our’ favour again.

Time zones and seasonal time shifts are strange phenomena. At this time of year, I can’t help feeling happy about living in the west of a time zone. You have to feel for the Poles who have to put up with sunset times of 3.15 p.m. in the depths of winter, whilst the Spanish might still be enjoying some rays of winter sunshine – however feeble – almost 3 hours later. And of course, the further north you go, the shorter the days become. I once had a fascination with looking at webcams in northern Norway in deepest December, but gave up because they were suicidally depressing – and I don’t even live there.

Daylight saving measures were first mooted in the late 19^th century and governments have been tinkering with them ever since. The map above shows the countries and states that currently implement daylight saving measures. They were actually brought in as a way of conserving energy in the summer months during the First World War, at first in Germany, and then the idea was quickly copied by other industrial powers in the northern hemisphere. The principle behind daylight saving measures is to make the best use of daylight in a way which benefits the majority of the population, taking into such factors of (road) safety and the needs of the economy. In the late 1960s, the UK government introduced British Standard Time, with clocks running on 'summer time' throughout the year, so in fact, the country was a full hour ahead of GMT. As I know from first-hand experience it meant going to school in the dark, but it was a lot lighter in the evenings. The experiment was abandoned in 1971 ostensibly on the grounds of road safety.

Even in a country as compact geographically as the UK, daylight lengths can vary considerably from the north to south. In winter, the Shetlands experience less than 6 hours of daylight around the solstice, whilst Cornwall in the far south-west has over 8. (Of course, the reverse is true in the summer, when there are 5 hours of darkness in the northernmost outpost of the British Isles.) Furthermore, there's almost an hour's difference in sunset times between the west and the east of the country. The variation in times and lengths of days means that there are advocates of change (or non-change) around the country. The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) favours a return to British Standard Time, with summer time (GMT+1) all year round. Going one stop further, some business people argue for the adoption of Central European Time, where the UK would effectively join the same time zone as the rest of Europe. Outdoor workers and farmers in Scotland however, are loath to see any changes to the current system, reasoning that summer time throughout the year would mean sunrise times as late as 10 a.m. 

A report in the NRC Handelsblad at the weekend pointed out yet another complication caused by the time shift. Many scientists, like Till Roenneberg, professor of medical psychology at the Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich – the subject of the NRC article - have argued that our body clocks are naturally attuned to sunrise and sunset times. By not listening to our biological clocks we put our health at risk. When the clocks change in the autumn, the additional hour, as well as the longer nighttime hours, give our bodies time to adjust and recover our natural sleep patterns. In the spring however, the ‘loss’ of an hour can take as much as a month to recoup in terms of sleep. Other studies have revealed that both suicide rates and the incidence of heart attacks increase after summer time comes into effect in the spring.

Changing the clocks poses other intriguing problems as well. I've often wondered what train drivers do in the middle of the night when the clocks go back. Presumably they go more slowly, or maybe stop for a nap and a cup of tea. And do they get paid overtime for this ‘extra’ hour? Self-evidently the reverse applies in spring when – somehow – they have to make up time. One supposes that traffic is scarce at that time of night anyway, so they can put on a spurt.

So what did I manage to do with those two extra hours? Simple: I spent my time penning this time-related blog.                 

Translation tips

Source texts come in all shapes and sizes. They are not always well written and not always intended for translation in the first place. Translators will always do their best, but customers shouldn’t automatically assume that a badly formulated source text can somehow be conjured into a creative and captivating target text. Here are a few tips for customers when they consider having documents and texts translated into another language.   

Think International

If your source text is primarily targeted at a domestic readership, it will not have the same impact at an international level. Your text may need adapting to reflect the social, cultural and economic nuances of the foreign market. For example, is an English text aimed at British or American audience? Or is it intended for a wider readership which uses English as a second language?    

Clarity, brevity and style

Write clearly in your own language. Avoid long sentences. Ask yourself if all the information is relevant. What is the audience? Will it keep the reader’s attention and interest? Get a colleague to check your text for style, clarity, spelling, punctuation, etc. before you even submit it for translation. Finalise your source language text before committing it for translation. Remember, last-minute changes can be expensive.

To get maximum impact, tell the translator exactly what the translation is for. A speech will require different use of language than a product information sheet or news article. A good translator will always adapt the style.

The native-speaker principle

You may pride yourself on how well you can speak a foreign language. But speaking is not writing! Never overestimate your written command of a second language. Resist the temptation to do it yourself. False friends are snakes in the grass! Clumsy use of a foreign language will be a turn-off. If you do decide to do it yourself, always have your text checked carefully by a competent native-speaker, especially if the document is intended for publication.

Background information

Translators are resourceful, but remember, they may not always be familiar with your business culture and language. Provide the translator with as much reference material as possible (illustrations, internet links, wordlist, glossaries, list of abbreviations, previous translations, etc.) Use a single contact person who deals with the translator exclusively.

Plan ahead

A translation should never be an afterthought, but part of the production chain. It is not simply a mechanical conversion of words into another language. A translation requires time and effort, sometimes more than is initially anticipated. Allow enough time for questions and feedback before the translation can be finalised.  

Lay-out

Is your text intended for publication or print? Remember that the length of a translated text may vary in length to the original source text. This is an important aspect in situations where space may be restricted.

And, of course, last but not least …

By now, this should be abundantly clear but resist the urge at all costs to use Google Translate and other automatic machine translation tools!

Texting is good for you

Apart from the obvious hazards of keying in a message whilst crossing a busy street, it’s a generally accepted fact nowadays that texting is good for you.

With text and instant messaging having become increasingly popular over the last decade, an argument has been raging as to whether texting is a help or hindrance to linguistic development and whether it is bastardising the language. The doom-mongers claim that texting will leave us mentally stunted, that it is leading to serious issues arising in the classroom, and that it is wrecking the language. The result will be a general decline in literacy. Others however are far more optimistic, claiming that the popularity of instant messaging on our mobile phones means that more and more people are using the written medium to communicate with each other. Textisms - that is, abbreviations, phonetic spellings, emoticons, etc. - rather than signalling sloppy use of the language, are actually a sign that the author of the message has a good grounding in the use of written language.

The public debate in the UK was sparked off by an article written by journalist and broadcaster, John Humphrys, who hosts the BBC’s flagship morning news programme on Radio 4. In an article he wrote for the (ever-the-conservative) Daily Mail in 2007 he described the ‘onward march of texters’ as a ‘sinister and deeply troubling’ development, with the SMS ‘vandals … destroying’ the language. He expressed a fear that ‘our written language may end up as series of ridiculous emoticons and ever-changing abbreviations’. 

Baroness Greenfield, a distinguished scientist researching into brain physiology, has also spoken about the dangers of young people’s preoccupation with instant messaging and the use of social media. In another Daily Mail article, she quoted a study by an Australian professor, which stated that mobile phone use, and in particular, predictive text tools, made children more impulsive and reckless. The speedy exchanges, Greenfield said, ‘may be contributing to the decline in our attention spans and perhaps even towards the rise of attention deficit disorders’.

The vast majority of research in the last few years however, has been favourable towards texting and instant messaging. Various studies have pointed out the fact that abbreviations, or a need to economise on the use of written text, have always been part of the language. In that sense, a conventional text message (which is limited to 160 characters) is no different to other forms of writing where space is constricted, such as a telegram, a classified advertisement, a newspaper headline or shorthand.

David Crystal, very much the guru of the English language, points out that texts which use textisms are linguistically quite complex, with texters (read ‘young people’) putting more effort into texting than is actually necessary. The reason he believes is that people find it fun. He calls this the ‘ludic drive’ and compares it to creative art forms we find in the Japanese haiku or the Welsh englyn.

Clare Wood, a researcher at Coventry University, has also carried out research into the use of texting and reading and spelling development. Most forms of textisms, she contends, ‘are phonetic in nature and require a level of phonological skill to produce and decode them, or a combination of alphabetic knowledge’. Her empirical research showed that children who used a higher proportion of textisms in their messages, relative to the overall length of the message, tended to be better at spelling than children who use more conventional spellings in their messages.      

Studies in Canada have also backed up these findings. In a paper written by Connie Varnhagen from the University of Alberta and two associates, the researchers conclude that there are few relationships between new language and [lack of] spelling ability. The researchers prefer to view electronic communication as both a new, complementary language to conventional written language and a natural experiment in the development of written communication.

Hans Bennis is professor of language variation at the University of Amsterdam. In an article in Onze Taal, he points out that people from all strata of society are writing more than ever before. Step onto any bus or train today and you’ll see people busily typing into their mobile phones or tablets. He has invented the term Korterlands to describe an abbreviated form of the Dutch language. And it’s nothing new he argues: Korterlands contains traditional abbreviations (which are rife in Dutch), such d.w.z., i.v.m. and enz. and other forms which have been used widely in e.g. classified ads for decades. It is hardly surprising that people are creative in using language for such applications as text messaging, twitter and social networking because of the number of permitted characters. The use of Korterlands, he concludes, does not form a threat to the language ability of writers. Conversely, it is the result of a creative process which assumes a working knowledge of the written language.

One thing that all these studies have in common is a wish to see these developments being included on the language curriculum in schools. Crystal: There are an extraordinary number of ways in which people play with language – creating riddles, solving crosswords, playing Scrabble, inventing new words, etc. Professional writers do the same, providing catchy copy for advertising slogans, thinking up puns in newspaper headlines, and writing poems, novels and plays. Children quickly learn that one of the most enjoyable things you can do with language is to play with its sounds, words, grammar and spelling. That, of course, includes texting.

On a personal level, as a translator who works with language on a daily basis I enjoy the challenge of a text. If you’re struggling for space in an SMS message, foreign words can often provide a solution, that is, if the recipient knows how to decode the language in the first place, so of course, it doesn’t work for everyone. Here are a few examples: weer (NL=weather), ici (FR=here), e (IT=and), ieri (IT=yesterday), bis (GER=until), ex (LATIN=from).

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