Can deaf people understand textspeak?

I’m sure they are familiar with how to pronounce letters and numbers, so yes.

Can a blind person see a ball if it’s thrown at them?!

Most deaf don’t read english. So txtspeak would be quite confusing.

@eponymoushipster: Sorry, should have clarified this. I mean in any language, not just english. I’m sure Spanish and French people have textspeak too.

@eponymoushipster Is this really true? I come into contact with many deaf people in my job and when they don’t bring a translator I can usually communicate with them by writing.

I was told by some friends who do asl that they don’t. They may understand words here and there, but a sentence has no meaning because asl grammar is different.

@eponymoushipster Interesting. Thanks for letting me know—I’ll have to be more careful the next time I come into contact with a deaf person. I’ll ask first.

@eponymoushipster: That’s really odd. I would think that they might not ASL using English grammar, but to be a useful worker, they would almost have to be able to write in English. Also, why would they just decide to be illiterate?

The last deaf person I ran into had been deaf her entire life. She didn’t really lip-read, but we had a nice chat in a journal of mine. Amusingly, it’s the only time I’ve ever “talked” with the person I sat next to on the airplane.

I would think it makes a difference if they were born deaf (or were otherwise deaf before developing/internalizing spoken language).

If so, then letters, numbers, words on a page would have no “sound” equivalent in their minds. I don’t know if any of us who can hear could even conceptualize what those symbols would be represented in their minds.

“2” and “u”, the examples given by the querent, likely wouldn’t work in most other languages anyway… how much more so for a congenitally deaf person with his/her own internalized language facsimile?!

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I should note that a deaf person who now employs a technical/medical solution that allows hearing now wouldn’t be the subject of this question. They can hear the similarity of “2” and “to”.

Aiee…. of course they can understand textspeak! Even if it’s auditory based, they make the connection between the meaning and the term, not the sound and the term. The sound itself is just the sound, not the meaning- the meaning exists independent of the sound. The sound is just a way to transfer meaning, and writing is another way to transfer meaning. If I were to either say or type “ich liebe,” or “creamos” it might have meaning for me, they exist in German and Spanish, respectively, are a collection of letters and sounds, but do not have meaning to those that do not know what it means, but easily can be learned. Once learned, they stop just being sounds and letters, but become concepts.
I teach Deaf kids, and fully guarantee you profoundly Deaf teenagers (born deaf or not) ‘get’ textspeak a heck of a lot better than their hearing parents do.

@linguaphile, can deaf people learn txtspk? Of course they can. It’s just a form of written language, after all.

But, as a lingua-phile, I expect you understand the nuanced difference between acronym and abbreviation-based txtspk – like lol = laugh out loud, ttyl = talk to you later – and those that are homonym-based – like replacing “you” with “u”, or “you’re” and “your” with “ur”, or “to” with “2”.

If a deaf person who has never seen txtspk before is shown something like “i c u”, I think it reasonable to assume they won’t be able to match the sounds of those letters with the sounds of the words “I see you”... as it’s all based on sound. They certainly can learn to make the proper association… but I think you have to admit it’s not as intuitively apparent to them as it would be to a person with complete hearing faculties.

No?

Years of strenuous speech therapy has made many, many deaf people much more metacognitively aware of phonetics than many hearing people are. Speech therapists were the original hooked on phonics people, drilling their little charges, starting at the wee ages of 2 and 3, on plosives, fricatives and the like.
Of course, I understand what you mean- there is a difference between acronyms and sound-based abbreviation, but doesn’t textspeak, as a whole, include acronyms and phonetic abbreviations, as well as the emoticons?
The faculty of intelligence isn’t in the cochlea, y’know?

@Robmandu- Umm… thinking about it some more, I have to partially concede, to a degree. Hypothetically, if a deaf person with no speech training, no background knowledge in phonetic ‘equivalents’ and a delay in acquiring English probably won’t automatically understand the phonetic connections you are suggesting. However, in reality there are very few deaf people who would fall in that range—very few. It might seem logical that they wouldn’t ‘get it,’ but logic is not always reality.
Deaf people were using texting way before it became popular for hearing people- Motorola came out with this horribly slow, cumbersome ‘pager’ in something like 1995 and it was the rage in the deaf community. They actually were way ahead on this one-
It is a misconception when it is automatically assumed that because it’s aural based, deaf people can’t access it. Not some crazy PC statement, but a fact.