The increasing prevalence of technology in society
has an impact on young people’s language use and development. Greeklish is the
writing of Greek texts using the Latin instead of the Greek alphabet, a
practice known as Latinization, also employed for many non-latin alphabet
languages. The primary aim of this research is to evaluate the effect of
Greeklish on reading time. A sample of 732 young Greeks were asked about their
habits when communicating through e-mail and social media with their friends
and they then participated in an experiment in which they were asked to read
and understand two short texts, one written in Greek and the other in
Greeklish. The findings of the research show that nearly one third of the
participants use Greeklish. The results of the experiment conducted reveal that
understanding is not affected by the alphabet used but reading Greeklish is
significantly more time consuming than reading Greek independently of the sex
and the familiarity of the participants with Greeklish. The findings suggest
that amending social and communication media with software utilities related to
Latinization such as language identifiers and converters may reduce reading
time and thus facilitate written communication among the users.
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