The Difference of Different Language Techniques used Interpersonal Relationships  Through Texting

Draft analysis 

Go back 40,000 years and you find every human walking the earth had only one real way communication could take place. It had to be done by face to face communication. If we fast forward the clock to the 21st century we will find out as we have evolved, so has the way we speak. Us humans now have a wide selection of ways and means of communicating to one another. One way is through the means of texting one another. Texting is a rather new invention but is one widely used in our day-to-day life and one everyone reading would know. It has huge advantages of being able to communicate to others thousands of kilometers away by transcribing what we want to say in words, into writing, which is then sent to someones mobile device. Of course when we do this, we lose many of our phonetic and paralinguistic features so us clever human being’s have made a substitute by many inventing many language techniques. But have you ever thought that you use different features and techniques depending who they are, or more specifically your interpersonal relationship with them. That subject is very broad so to narrow it down to friends and family.

While texting between both family and friends use similar language techniques I have discovered that friends use the same techniques as each other more often. With data that was available to me I found that friends used almost all the same language techniques while texting between family members did not have the same results. For example if one friend doesn’t use punctuation the other generally wouldn’t either,if one used initialism the would generally use it as well. While with family i found that only one family member would use initialism or logograms, ect. I suspect the reasoning to this is that people want to fit in and don’t want to be left out. This is in our nature because back thousands of years ago humans relied on each other for survival and if didn’t fit in then you would be on your own and have slim chances. This does not however apply to family because family members look after and care for each other and you can’t change your family. On the other hand friends are not set,you can make new friends and some fade away, and you generally want friends that have similar way of thinking as you do, and ones you can trust and rely to be beside you. So an easy way to show that you are similar is “text” like they do or use similar language.   This would show them that you are similar and that you want to be(or are) there friend and could perhaps be something we do subconsciously.This shows that different interpersonal relationships do indeed wield different language techniques as they use at different rates and reasons

Another reason that friends use the same language techniques is because they are from time era. usually when we make friends they are usually from the same time era or generation. Now we all know that young teenagers tend to use more informal way of texting in many forms such as initialism. Now because parents are much older that their children there is that gap of. 

An interesting thing about is that people can have interpersonal relationships with other at different ages. As we know different generations use different language techniques(especially the younger generation), and because family members are often of different ages, but friends are mostly within the same age group, this can also mean different interpersonal relationships can also use different language techniques as well. For example when friends are texting between themselves, they often use more initialisms,unusual spelling and logograms than between family members. Some of these language techniques such as initialism logograms are designed to speed the conversation up rather than have to type out full word. For example “hby” is a initialism  or “how about u” is a logogram, both mean “how about you” in short. The reason friends use these techniques more than family is because it is more widely accepted  and used between friends rather than some (older) family members who may not understand as they may have not have been exposed to enough of these language features before hand. Another reason is like the one explained in the last paragraph, people want to fit in and don’t want to be left out, which encourages these features to be used within friendship’s more so than within families. These different features all show different language features between friends and family and why they happen to be so.

When we are texting each other, we can convey huge amounts and very high speed over a long distance. However when we do this we lose many paralinguistic and phonetic language features, which can lead to misperception and confusion. A way we attempt to apply these paralinguistic and phonetic features is by using emojis and repeated punctuation or repeated capital letters. For example a laughing face emoji (?) is indicating you laughed at something typed or a sad face (?) is indicating you feel sad towards something typed. Of course in normal face to face conversation we don’t mention we feel these things because we display it by our body language. However of course when we text we don’t have the privilege of being right next to someone so we have to display it to avoid confusion. These help fill in the paralinguistic features that we miss. Friends and families both use them however as you might predict family use a lot more love heart emojis for obvious reasons and you also be able to predict friends tend use other emojis like laughing, as friends have more “banter”. So both friends and family use emojis. But do the rate of what they use them change? Of course it does, there’s even a difference between friends and family use of emojis at the start of a conversation and at the end. From what I have gathered. Of course this like every else Im talking about has a infinite number of variables but after a reasonable amount of analysing of text conversation of others and my own i found that emojis are used much more wildly between friends than family(family not including partner, ect). A study(Repurposing Emoji for Personalised Communication) by Sarah Wiseman and Sandy J.J proves this and also goes into more detail about how we repurpose the emoji or in other words how we use emojis differently depending on who we are talking to. Some were used to display humour or affection. But the interesting thing was that Emojis could be used to maintain or even strengthen a interpersonal relationship. For example it gives the idea that “i am thinking of you”. The different way we use on emojis depending who we are texting shows that indeed we do change our language techniques depending on who we are texting.

All of these observations are showing some of the ways that language changes between friends versus family and explain explain why that is the case. from whether it’s the way we use emojis or how many language feature we use or even whether why we try to use same language features for social status. These are only a few examples but shows how quickly humans have evolved to talk differently depending on who the person is. Interesting implication is that perhaps something i is someone wanted to know your relationship with someone (like social media they could understand this simply by messages on what you are going to have for breakfast or what your currently doing just by the way you text someone

All of these differences are one overall generalization and may not be the same for everyone. Most of these observations based on a limited amount of evidence so may not be completely correct

This same feature could also show how strong friendships are, although with my knowledge i can not confirm. (conclusion perhaps)

 

 

 

Bibliography

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpersonal_relationship 20th of February(definition of Interpersonal relation Ships)

http://novaonline.nvcc.edu/eli/spd110td/interper/relations/relations.html 20th of February(Main Types of interpersonal relationships)

http://research.gold.ac.uk/22850/6/EmojiACMless.pdf 27th of febuary (Emojis)

 Stephen Hawking, Graham Lawton (2016) The origin of almost everything

 

Student resources (text)

Oliver.C (Own) http://oliver.mtaspiring.edutronic.net/text-transcripts/ (Freinds)