Is SMS killing the written English Language?

This blog came to me a couple of days ago after watching a bit of a documentary on the English language, and it talked about back in the day when Shakespear took the English language as it was then a new great language and crafted it into some memorable lines with his plays like "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players."

Since then, all we have tried to do is shorten the words we use, changing "of the clock" to "o'clock", "good day" to "g'day" and so on. But since the introduction of the internet, and subsequent chat rooms, things have been shorten even further so we can keep pace with conversations with either one or two hands depending on the nature of the conversation ;).

But really it has been the introduction of SMS that has really sped thngs up 2 a g8 r8, 2 da point ppl find it hard 2 read da msg!

Back when I was a kid, playing on my Super Nitendo, I remember my great aunt going on about how calculators ruin kids and game consoles are bad - which obviously speaking to any 30 something year old male, married or otherwise, they are not - and how kids were abusing the language, it's just a natural flow. In fact I would say that kids are the greatest users of any language, and are the prime movers for change in language which should be commended rather than dismissed as poor.

So is it killing the language? I'm not so sure, I think it's more the fact that as the world becomes faster in pace, and functions becoming more time critical that SMS is a language warming for one of a better term, and it's purely speeding up a process that was always going to happen like carbon in the atmosphere, this is an inevitable fact and it wouldn't suprise me in the years to come, this form of written language becomes a standard speak and something that is taught in schools!