Lilspeak vs. age-appropriate language
Jun. 29th, 2005 11:05 am![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
shandra.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
multiplicity_archivesThis is probably beating a dead horse a little but I don't really like to see people feel their kids are being negated by a discussion about Lilspeak.
So I just wanted to distinguish a bit between bad spelling/grammar and Lilspeak, apart from the rant. And say why we decided to discourage our kids from learning or using it.
Children acquire language in a fairly specific pattern. This article from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders shows some of them. People who have worked in special ed (I did, although not at a very high level) know that quite often it's possible to identify a physical or neurological learning difficulty simply by looking at kids' written mistakes. Mistakes that transpose (flip) letters are one kind, mistakes that get the wrong sounds are another kind, etc. Not all spelling mistakes have a reason - that's why you get *really weird* spellings sometimes, that aren't phonetic - but that in itself demonstrates a clear stage that the child is at.
Why Lilspeak is controversial is that often the way it is written on the 'net doesn't follow the rules of language acquisition. It's not just a case of delayed development - someone in a multiple system writing like they're 5 when they're 7 - it's that the errors common in Lilspeak are not commonly made child grammatical errors. Also, as people have noted, quite often the errors are superficial - phonetic spelling, for example - while the underlying verb/tense/clause construction is fine (and quite advanced).
Now the reasons for this could be a zillion - overlapping adult consciousnesses, absorbing social/grammar/spelling rules on the net (kids are good at this - in fact that's how they absorb language), whatever. In a way Lilspeak is more like a pidgin language - a strange hybrid between how children "sound" inside and the adults hearing it. Functionally kids who use it have learned a new language.
But why it can be controversial is that anyone that is aware of how kids acquire language will not perceive Lilspeak as a child language. It may make them more suspicious and less accepting of system kids. It may in rare cases open a system child who /is/ trying to communicate to ridicule or skepticism that isn't necessary. And as a group concern (which I don't worry about too much, but it is there) it can make the typing look "faked" and "not really a kid" to anyone who's trying to prove that for whatever reason.
You could say to your average person Lilspeak probably looks the same as actual poor spelling, but I myself think anyone sensitive to language patterns will pick up on the bad-spelling-but-complex-sentences dissonance, on some level. And we have generally found that if people feel something is 'off' they get closed-minded pretty fast.
As long as one's system kids only talk to other multiple systems' kids, it won't be an issue if that's the dialect they choose to acquire and learn - so no harm, no foul in that sense. But if one's looking at a broader audience for system kids to communicate with, it may cause problems.
I don't think being aware of this is elite or snobby. I don't even think it means "down with Lilspeak!" Neither does it mean "down with bad spelling!"
I'm just saying, sometimes the Lilspeak hides the realness of the child rather than communicating that reality. And hopefully that information can be useful to people in making their own decisions about it.
So I just wanted to distinguish a bit between bad spelling/grammar and Lilspeak, apart from the rant. And say why we decided to discourage our kids from learning or using it.
Children acquire language in a fairly specific pattern. This article from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders shows some of them. People who have worked in special ed (I did, although not at a very high level) know that quite often it's possible to identify a physical or neurological learning difficulty simply by looking at kids' written mistakes. Mistakes that transpose (flip) letters are one kind, mistakes that get the wrong sounds are another kind, etc. Not all spelling mistakes have a reason - that's why you get *really weird* spellings sometimes, that aren't phonetic - but that in itself demonstrates a clear stage that the child is at.
Why Lilspeak is controversial is that often the way it is written on the 'net doesn't follow the rules of language acquisition. It's not just a case of delayed development - someone in a multiple system writing like they're 5 when they're 7 - it's that the errors common in Lilspeak are not commonly made child grammatical errors. Also, as people have noted, quite often the errors are superficial - phonetic spelling, for example - while the underlying verb/tense/clause construction is fine (and quite advanced).
Now the reasons for this could be a zillion - overlapping adult consciousnesses, absorbing social/grammar/spelling rules on the net (kids are good at this - in fact that's how they absorb language), whatever. In a way Lilspeak is more like a pidgin language - a strange hybrid between how children "sound" inside and the adults hearing it. Functionally kids who use it have learned a new language.
But why it can be controversial is that anyone that is aware of how kids acquire language will not perceive Lilspeak as a child language. It may make them more suspicious and less accepting of system kids. It may in rare cases open a system child who /is/ trying to communicate to ridicule or skepticism that isn't necessary. And as a group concern (which I don't worry about too much, but it is there) it can make the typing look "faked" and "not really a kid" to anyone who's trying to prove that for whatever reason.
You could say to your average person Lilspeak probably looks the same as actual poor spelling, but I myself think anyone sensitive to language patterns will pick up on the bad-spelling-but-complex-sentences dissonance, on some level. And we have generally found that if people feel something is 'off' they get closed-minded pretty fast.
As long as one's system kids only talk to other multiple systems' kids, it won't be an issue if that's the dialect they choose to acquire and learn - so no harm, no foul in that sense. But if one's looking at a broader audience for system kids to communicate with, it may cause problems.
I don't think being aware of this is elite or snobby. I don't even think it means "down with Lilspeak!" Neither does it mean "down with bad spelling!"
I'm just saying, sometimes the Lilspeak hides the realness of the child rather than communicating that reality. And hopefully that information can be useful to people in making their own decisions about it.
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no subject
Date: 2005-06-30 12:13 am (UTC)I've been gaming since the days of the Atari and the Commodore 64, so yeah, I know how that is. At the same time, though, I had experience with text adventure games, and writing my own games and widgets in Pascal and other early programming languages, and in text games and programming, spelling and grammar can be the difference between being stuck with endless error messages and blazing through in a cloud of FUN. So there's that to be considered too. Heck, that's how come I remember the spelling for "procedure" at 9. I kept spelling it with two "e"s and the compiler would sputter over it. But I went years before learning that "counterfeit" ended f-e-i-t and not f-i-t... and as for grammar, you can't really make a good madlibs story program without knowing your grammar.
I wonder if there are any floppy backups of those old Pascal programs. If I found them, I could re-work/re-word them into Javascript or Z-Code for the heck of it. That'd be kind of fun.
I think a lot of it is just the increasing availability of the Internet-- it lost that sense of community it had in the beginning.
Yeah, I tend to refer to what happened as the "AOL Boom", because I think AOL made it easier for a lot of people to get online who might never have considered it otherwise. Not a bad thing, necessarily, but it's like the difference between a tiny private school and a huge public school, y'know?
...wait, that would explain so much about the internet. Haha, crap, why didn't I think of that sooner?
it's okay for people to call her a kid or a child, but never a little.
Cira tolerates the term "little" because she's short, and nobody's used it to dismiss her or anything like that (like, say, "Oh, you wouldn't know, you're too little"-- I HATED THAT AS A KID, RARRRR). But then she asks questions like, "Why aren't short adult people called littles too? They're as little as I am, right?" And then we all go buhhhhhh until Bao comes up with a really funny but totally bullshit answer that Nomiya will kick his ass over.
...you know, come to think of it, we're terrible bad influences. She's going to grow up believing that lawyers are born as homonculi from dented cans of pea soup or something at this rate. (Quick! We have to find an Other World where there's intelligent botulism, STAT! ;)
no subject
Date: 2005-06-30 12:28 am (UTC)Do you mean to tell me that they are not??? But