New txtspeak dictionary

[Damien Hall]

The charity NetRespect (based in Liverpool, England), which (to paraphase
their website) aims to educate schools, children and educators in the safe
and respectful use of the Internet and has written software to help achieve
this aim, has produced a dictionary of abbreviations and acronyms that it
finds to be commonly used in chatrooms and IM. Their name for these
acronyms and abbreviations is Kids Internet Talk (KIT; _sic_, no
apostrophe). The dictionary can be bought from them (also _via_ their
website, though a free sample download of a few pages is available there
too.

http://www.netrespect.co.uk/family.php

This is a laudable effort towards their aim of promoting online safety, but
they don't seem to realise that there are websites that do this already
(UrbanDictionary etc), or that a book probably isn't the best medium for
this kind of information (and, even if it was, it's been done already). In
what they say about it, they admit that this 'code' 'evolves fast', but
then they emphasise that they have spent a year putting the dictionary
together (presumably this is meant to imply that a lot of thought and
research has gone into it, and that it is a reliable resource). That aside,
though, for the linguistic purposes of people on these lists, this might be
an interesting documentation of online abbreviations and acronyms at this
moment in time. I haven't looked at the book, but it is aimed at helping
non-teenagers understand the 'code' used by older people trolling chatrooms
posing as teenagers and looking for sexual victims. Since such people are
likely to want to contact teens who say they are local to them, so that
they can meet, and the charity is based in Northern England, this might (?)
imply a BrE focus in the book, maybe?

Anyway, FYI.

Damien

--
Damien Hall

University of York
Department of Language and Linguistic Science
Heslington
York YO10 5DD
UK

Tel. (office) 01904 432665
     (mobile) 0771 853 5634
Fax  01904 432673
http://www.york.ac.uk/res/aiseb/

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