Opinion: GR8! It's a Text Message From Darwin

(April 23) -- A new report showing that the typical American teenager sends 50 text messages a day, and one in three sends more than double that number, is only the latest indication of how pervasive cell phones and text communication have become in American life.

The poll by the Pew Research Center and the University of Michigan shows that the number of teenagers who said in September that they text-message daily soared to 54 percent from 38 percent in just a year and a half. Indeed, there seems to be a whole new language developing from instant-messaging constructions such as "brb" and "lol," and sound-based terms such as "l8r."

Which leads me to ask the question: Is Charles Darwin's "survival of the fittest" now being fought over language in the high-tech world of cell phones and text messages?

Is ease of use all that it takes to guarantee a language's survival?

For those who deplore the teenage language of texting, it should be noted that Darwin himself had clear opinions about the role of language in understanding our place in nature. As he wrote:

"A struggle for life is constantly going on among the words and grammatical forms in each language. The better, the shorter, the easier forms are constantly gaining the upper hand. ... The survival and preservation of certain favored words in the struggle for existence is natural selection."

Darwin's words suggest that language, like biological evolution, should be viewed as an adaptive system in its own right.

As with texting, it's apparent that the linguistic structures surviving the winnowing of evolution are the ones that are easiest to learn and process.

Which helps answer one question that has puzzled scholars for centuries: Why is it that young children are able to acquire language so easily and without direct instruction, while adults struggle to learn another language, despite every advantage of intellectual maturity and instructional tools?

It has long been thought that to accomplish this feat, children must have some sort of innate blueprint that details the grammatical properties common to all languages.

Trouble is, there's no feasible explanation for how such an innate blueprint for language could have evolved.

The more likely explanation is that children find language easy to learn because language has adapted to us, and to children in particular, not because we are adapted for language.

So patterns in language reflect biases in the way we learn and process information, and each new generation of learners therefore has the right biases for learning language.

If language has been selected to be learnable through cultural evolution across generations of learners, what does that mean for texting, the latest offshoot on the language tree?

The Pew survey illustrates how quickly technology is changing the cultural evolution of language. In the early days of texting, the limitations of typing words on a cell phone's nine buttons resulted in the shortening of words.

However, now that many phones come with standard QWERTY keyboards, the length of the text messages is increasing and fewer words are abbreviated.

So next time you shudder at a message containing IMHO and OMG, just remember that you are observing evolution in action.

Morten Christiansen is associate professor of psychology at Cornell University.