Wired’s Kristen Philipkoski once reported “The Web Not the Death of Language”..We have entered a new era of expression. Communicating using instant messenger, text messaging, even blogging […its future could well be short messaging style ] are changing the way humans communicate. Loud applause please! W00T an expression of joy coined by online gamers,was crowned Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year for 2007.The word typically spelled with zeroes, and not the letter o, reflects the growing use of electronic communication in our lives using numeric keyboards to type words with self-evident numeral-letter substitutions.

Nevertheless the announcement attracted healthy criticisms of traditional linguists whereas boingboing & wired seemed upbeat on the announcement.

W00t’s popularity may root back to its music & technology connection as these two serves as catalyst to easy adoption of a word into our daily life. Not impressed ? There is no end to the google search results of w00t, and its cousins with various number of 0s in middle of the word [ The w00t paradox ] .

A search in blogpulse shows the paramount buzz ‘W00T’ generated over “poke”.

MSN Adlab predicts something interesting on these buzzwords.

“poke” is female oriented with age distribution less than 18. “W00T” on the other hand is male oriented with age distribution 18-24.The driving force of this wacky lingo are primarily youth & stats on them are mind blowing.

• Out of the 18 million college students, 95% use the Internet at least once a month.
• 95% own a mobile phone.
• 78% sent a text message in the past week.
• 77% of today’s online youth would rather live without television than live without the Internet.

There are 2.7 billion mobile phones in use. The number of worldwide mobile phone users is expected to grow to approximately 3.3 billion in 2011. The Asia-Pacific region is expected to account for 47.9% of global subscribers by 2011. Globally, nearly one in three mobile subscribers will use a mobile broadband connection by 2012. This will represent over one billion users. [Sources: Juniper, EITO, MIC, Strategy Analytics via Trendwathcing]

Trendwatching coins this mega-trend Online Oxygen. It stands for those who virtually crave for online access anywhere/anytime. In your blissful ignorance they already have done mounting sabotage to the Queens English.

• Apparently in 2005 text lingos like B4 (before), BBL (be back later), CUL8R (see you later),HAND (have a nice day) have found a place in the Oxford corpus.
• They ridiculed traditional linguists & submitted essay written completely in text message in exam answers.In reaction to that late 2006,the Scottish Qualifications Authority [SQA) allowed text lingos in English literature exams. Shortly after that New Zealand Qualifications Authority (NZQA) qualified text lingo as an acceptable language in the external end of year exams.
• They flock(ed) in Urban dictionary [one of the PC Mag Top 100 classic website ], provide(d) & vote(d) on possible definition(s) of slang(s),thereby created “user-generated online slang dictionary” with more than 1 million entries. Infinite monkeys with infinite typewrites are daily annexing roughly 2,000 colorful, picturesque, imaginative, and shocking slangs there, inroading ”pregret”,”United Statians”, “gnar” ,“cincinatti bowtie” into our daily parlance.Other sources where slangs are being fostered includes Lingoz , Pseudodictionary ,Netlingo .

Runner up of 2007 word of the year contest was Facebook. As a verb it signifies using Facebook.com to create a profile, searching for a friend, communicating and host of other activities on the site. No surprise here, the verbs are almost similar to delicious tags for facebook i.e social networking, community & friend primarily.

What’s interesting to note is convergence of social networking & mobile in imthere ,Goovr ,BuzzD & host of other sites.Juniper Research predicts this market will be worth $6B by 2012.

Hmm..seems an army of 1 Billion is just gearing up to shape “the parts of speech” of our 2012 grammar.

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