Da times they r a changin!

By JOSIE CLARKE social issues reporter

CAN U TLK NGLSH?

Your children can.

Mobile English, or text messaging, is taking over as the new teenage language and baffling parents and teachers alike.

Full of acronyms, abbreviations and teenage jargon, texting is proving wildly popular among youth, who are adopting the abbreviated slang for everyday use.

The Association for Teaching English even got hip when it titled its latest conference CM 2 NGLSH @ AKL 2K1: HIT NEW LITERACIES, or Come to English in Auckland in 2001.

President Phil Coogan said teachers acknowledged that language was changing rapidly in response to the electronic environment.

The neatest contraptions combine letters and numerals. Vodafone, the world's biggest mobile-telephone company, offers a guide on its internet site to phrases including SPK 2 U L8R (Speak to you later) and HI RUF2T OR TXT (Hello, are you free to talk or text?)

The changing lingo is based on the growing popularity of text messages.

Worldwide, an estimated 15 billion text messages are sent a month. The popularity of texting in New Zealand was demonstrated last year when Vodafone logged two million messages a day during a free text-messaging promotion.

Katie Fisher, aged 14, who has owned a mobile phone since July, said teachers had warned her and her classmates against writing in text language. "Teachers tell us to write in full, or we'll get marks off."

She learned the lingo by picking up messages from other people. "We all know what it means, and there are always new words turning up."

Katie and her friend Jade Hyslop, who received her phone for Christmas, revealed that -ing endings are out in teenage text speak.

For example, "going" should always be spelled GOIN, and "the" is written as DA. RU GOIN 2 DA PRTY 2NITE translates as "Are you going to the party tonight?"

Perhaps the biggest incentive for teens is the cheap cost of texting. Messages usually cost 20c to send, or about $20 a month to operate a phone, instead of hundreds of dollars on normal mobile calls.

Philippa Brown, 15, said she hardly ever uses her phone to talk, preferring instead to send text messages.