Do you want to sound natural or artificial when you have an informal conversation? If you use formal language while chatting with someone face to face or online, you sound unnatural as formal language or expressions are inappropriate for informal situations.
Formal language in an informal setting distances the persons engaged in a conversation. A chat, by definition, is an informal conversation. To chat with someone means to engage in a friendly and informal conversation with someone. Informal language is used in texting and on social networking sites. Recently, I had an opportunity to analyse some Facebook chats. Some users had used formal language though the setting demanded them to use informal expressions. Such chats were formal and thus sounded artificial. Here is an example:
A: Did you have your dinner?
B: Yes, I did. What about you?
A: I had my dinner about an hour ago.
B: Do you have your dinner usually at 8 pm?
A: Yes, all the members of my family have dinner around 8 pm. And therefore, I too have dinner around 8 o’clock.
Does the above piece of chat sound natural? No. Though it is not formal, the sentence structure used is inappropriate for a chat. Now look at this:
A: Had your dinner?
B: Yeah, and you?
A: An hour ago.
B: So early? Is it your usual time?
A: Yeah. Everybody at home has dinner around 8. So, I too.
This piece of chat is quite informal and thus very natural as it is characterised by simple, common and informal words (mostly mono-or disyllabic words) and simple sentence structures. Here are informal expressions that we can use to ask how someone is:
• How’s it going?
• How ya doing?
• How’s life?
• What’s up?
• What’s new?
Here are some informal expressions we can use to say how we are:
• Great.
• Pretty good.
• Same as always.
• Not bad.
• Not so great.
I also came across many chat abbreviations such as FYI (for your information), LOL (laugh out loud), BBN (bye bye now), CYAL8R (see you later), JTLYK (just to let you know) and BWL (bursting with laughter) in messages. Recently, at an English Language Teaching conference, a teacher vehemently expressed her views against chat language used by students. Her argument was that students who use chat language tend to produce ungrammatical sentences. When she asked me to express my opinion, I said, “Let the users of social media use the language they are comfortable with. It is the language of Gen Y and Gen Z. If it is required, let us also learn the chat language in order to connect with Gen Y and Gen Z students who do not know what it is like without an internet connection or a cell phone.”
BTW, the term Gen X refers to those who were born in the 60s and 70s, Gen Y refers to those who were born from during the 80s and 90s and Gen Z refers those who were born in the 21st century.
— rayanal@yahoo.co.uk