Text Messaging as a Precursor of Linguistic Decadence for Students in Some Nigerian Tertiary Institutions

Abstract

Electronic text messaging in Nigeria is an entrenched linguistic behavior which has caught the attention of an enormous youth population and it is adversely affecting the acquisition of linguistic competence. This paper investigated the use of text messages by students in some tertiary institutions in Lagos State, Nigeria in order to examine the various deviant linguistic features and degree of departure from standard variety of English usage. The study utilized extracts from two hundred text messages collected for analysis from male and female undergraduate students between July 2021 and June 2022. Our findings reveal that texting negatively impacts writing skill of students and the noticeable linguistic anomalies are: non-standard spellings, word order violations, disjunctive orthography, anomalous punctuations, vowel deletion, use of slang and colloquialisms, surface diagraphia and others. The paper concludes that since anything goes in texting and it is not regulated, it may wreck the language because it has a pernicious effect on the linguistic competence of students and on the general standard of education. It then recommends that educators should rise to the challenge and instill in students the formal writing skill they need to succeed.