These younger generations have pretty much ruined written communication. Years of texting, e-mail, tweeting, and the like have led to a complete disregard for punctuation, capitalization, and other basic concepts of writing. All they write is an ambiguous stream of words, random letters, and even numbers pretending to be words. Even something as simple as a comma which completely changes the meaning of a sentence is too much trouble for them.


Millennials' reply:

ok boomer

I know whereof you speak. This boomer is learning how to send texts via his one-month old smartphone. You have to toggle to a secondary keyboard to find punctuation and numerals, for example. Too much trouble. Capitals are iffy, sometimes prompted by the algorithm, sometimes not.

It all takes twice as long as it does on the full keyboard on your desktop or laptop. I guess you're supposed to become facile with it after a while. But important sense-making tools get tossed to the wayside.

Much like the 7-white/5-black “piano keyboard” shapes piano repertoire, so too the smartphones’ “virtual keyboards” shape the “natural” languages.

Shiro, I have a hypothesis:
Societies that live in vast, sparse, open spaces will develop different speaking style than those living in dense, close quarters. The former would have a bias toward words that project well (e.g., more vowel sounds) while the later would have a bias toward words that cut through background noises and in short distance easier to distinguish from surrounding conversations (e.g., more consonants).
As a linguist, what do you think?