The Oxford American Dictionary published by the Oxford University Press recently released its “Words of the Year 2009” and with little surprise words formed out of social media dominate the list. “Tweetups”, “Hashtag”, “Tag cloud” and the 2009 word of the year “Unfriend” lead a list of new terms and definitions that have made their way into the prestigious and long trusted Oxford dictionary. But some are worried that texting and tweeting are destroying the English language, and while words like Unfriend and Tweetups are logical nouns/verbs used to facilitate social norms online, the truncated use of language in messages such as “soz 4 skrn u 2day” and “will b L8, car trub lol” represent a butchering of grammar that many sociolinguistic experts fear has irreparably damaged our language already. Add to that the recent additions of non-English websites with Arabic domain names and Asian URLs and it looks like the domination of the online world by the Queen’s English is coming 2 a close. Oops, sorry about that. Experts such as Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt have predicted that Chinese will soon be the dominant online language as China has been experiencing gr8 online growth. WTF?! Sorry, sorry.

But many others have argued that linguistic protectionism can also suffocate a language or culture when such policies prevent a culture or language from adapting to economic, political or technological change.  It’s interesting 2 C how anglophone leaders on both sides of the Atlantic have been far less outraged than the French over erosion or mutation of our collective syntax.  OMG Jacques Chirac would not B LOL over the effects of txt and msg on French 4-real. Seriously! I am so sorry, it’s just become habit now. It’s way faster and I don’t get paid hourly.

So as the French (not all of them though) are tripping over themselves to protest the use of our bastardized chimera of a language in the EU and culturally cloister themselves from the onslaught of our watered down Germanic gibberish in their daily lives, the Oxford dictionary announces “Unfriend” as the 2009 word of the year.   In France the unfriending process is known as “la défaire d’un ami dans le Livre des Visages“.

Doesn’t that sound better? And with all those extra words they still manage to work 15 fewer hours a week than we do.