How words are disappearing from our digital lives

What’s missing from these chats? Words. Words are slipping out of our digital lives as more people’s interactions with their social circles depend on reels and reacjis. Technology has slowly eaten into our need to use words even as generative AI erodes our ability to string them together into cohesive sentences. What started with SMS shorthand born out of character limits and evolved through erstwhile Twitter’s brevity has eventually come to all platforms prioritising visuals over text. Across social media and messaging apps, emojis, GIFs, stickers, reacjis, template replies and AI-generated suggestions occupy the spaces where sentences framed by a human once thrived.

In effect, words have not just become less common, they’ve become optional, leaving us to contend with how this changes the way we express, connect with, and understand each other and ourselves. “Words are now such a small part of our digital society," says Anand, a Mumbai-based poet and content professional. Most people don’t read captions, they just like a picture and scroll away. “The speed at which you go from one Instagram story to another is not conducive to reading. On reels, words on the video are essentially subtitles," he says. “I’m now thinking which reacji fits as a reply to a conversation and moving on." With friends who tend to respond only via stickers, or “personalised memes", he feels the urge to add them to his library, and then respond with a befitting sticker of his own. “Words have escaped my thought process," he reckons.

The more effort you have to take, the less time you spend on an app, says Vikrama Dhiman, who works in product management at a consumer internet company in Singapore. Which is why every platform is optimising for reduced text input from users. But this instinct isn’t new. Twitter (now X) did it as early as 2009 with the retweet button by removing the need to manually type “RT" or “QT" to reshare a post or quote someone, and Facebook’s “Like" button fundamentally changed engagement on that platform, he recalls. “Food apps do it now by letting you reorder from your frequently visited restaurants without typing a single word."

Not all of this is a deliberate attempt to eliminate text, argues Padmini Ray Murray, 48, founder of Design Beku, a digital rights and design justice consultancy in Bengaluru. “Designers build for scale, and in countries like India, they also have to consider large sections of low-literacy users, which explains some of this optimisation." But the shift shows up in everyday digital habits, says Dhiman. “Festive greetings have gone from typed-out messages to stickers and gifs. Even birthday dedications—once long, heartfelt posts—have shrunk into a single Instagram story: a photo, a template, a quick caption, and you’re done." Instagram did not respond to an emailed query on the topic.

Anand notices he is “losing the skill to have a continued conversation," and even more unsettling, that he’s strangely “okay losing it." “It scares me to think that I can’t remember how I was doing conversations before reacjis, stickers, and ‘like’ came into our lives." The shift is affecting his communication skills in the physical world, too, making him conscious of finding the right words at the right time. “I don’t know yet what my brain has lost in this process," he says.

Mumbai-based neurologist Siddharth Warrier could explain that perhaps. “Language is a bi-sided phenomenon," he says. The left side of the brain links words to meaning, while the right side helps turn those words into coherent sentences. Within that system, the brain’s Wernicke area handles comprehension, while Broca manages expression. Memory, he says, strengthens through use. When we read, the words we absorb are reused when we speak or write, reinforcing recall. Visual content, however, behaves differently: it’s easy to take in but far harder to express because we still have to convert what we see into language, which for most people means words, unless someone is an artist who can reproduce visual content in a different format. “We never wrote letters to each other unlike our elders and we are the worse for it," says Warrier, 37.

Letters forced people to sit with their feelings, he explains. “My generation grew up on texts, and the next is growing up with emojis." Emojis and reaction tools make communication faster, he clarifies, but they also remove the friction that deepens self-understanding. “Words are work, they’re not easy. The act of putting words to emotions allows us more insight to regulate and analyse them." Warrier notes that we’re consuming far more—and most of it visual—than we’re expressing. That means Wernicke is always active while Broca, meant for expression, is underused. Over time, this has led to a “gradual shallowing of our thoughts".

In an ICSE school in Mumbai, Shreya Bhagattjee witnesses a “shallowing of thoughts" in real time. Bhagattjee has been teaching English, mass communication and geography to students of classes IX to XII for close to a decade. “Compared to five years ago, students struggle more with writing coherent sentences and essays," she says. What surprises her is not just the decline in writing but the rise of a new preoccupation: mastering AI. “Children tell me they want to learn how to use AI to their advantage, how to frame a prompt that gives you exactly the answer you’re looking for," she says. The skill they are cultivating isn’t expression but optimisation: learning to ask machines to write for them. AI can be useful when you want to remove emotion from something you’re trying to communicate, says Anshuma Kshetrapal, a Delhi-based creative arts psychotherapist. “But when it comes to articulating feelings, I’ll condemn its use because it removes the ‘I’ from the conversation. There’s no personal nuance, no scope for self-reflection."

Conflict resolution and emotional clarity, she argues, were never skills one learned through rote instruction. “You really have to go through the rigour of having the conflict, of understanding how words have impact and how situations resolve themselves." In an era of “low-effort, minimal text conversations", she fears that “the muscle is simply going to atrophy, especially for people growing up in these times because there’s so little infrastructure around learning it."

The erosion of meaningful conversation isn’t limited to the young. It’s showing up across generations. Minari Shah, a Mumbai-based communications consultant in her 50s, traces it to the explosion of digital communities. “There are too many group chats now," she says. They’re efficient for logistics: planning meetings, syncing calendars, sending quick updates. But they leave little room for depth. “It’s become harder to offer nuanced thoughts on any topic," she says. Most groups, she notes, run on a steady stream of forwards, memes and birthday messages. Further, with LinkedIn’s quick-reply prompts nudging you to fire off a congratulations message, people probably receive more wishes than ever and remember them less than ever, Shah says. What disappears in the process is intimacy: the one-on-one exchanges where people actually trade ideas and allow themselves to be vulnerable.

LIMITING WORLD VIEWS

British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously wrote, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world," suggesting that our grasp of reality is shaped by the words available to us. The shrinking space for language has long had philosophers worried. And why wouldn’t it? There’s evidence that this linguistic narrowing has been happening for decades. In July, a study published in the UK-based journal Earth found that nature-related words in English declined by more than 60% between 1800 and 2019. Terms like “blossom," “meadow," “moss" have slowly faded from use. In 2015, the Oxford Junior Dictionary dropped words like “acorn" and “magpie" in favour of “blog" and “MP3 player," triggering a public outrage, including protests from authors like Margaret Atwood. But the editors argued that dictionaries reflect the usage of language, not its preservation.

As urbanisation expanded after 1850, people encountered the natural world less often, and the language for it began to disappear, they pointed out. We lose words for what we no longer encounter. First, it was the birds and the wild flowers. But what happens when we begin losing the habit of using words at all? Leena Dihingia, who teaches linguistics at Gauhati University in Assam, is cautious about framing this as linguistic decline. She prefers the term “linguistic adaptation." Language, she says, has always reshaped itself to suit the medium it travels through. “From letters to telegrams to SMS, we’ve always shortened forms. Now with stories and reels and stickers, we are adapting again. Multilingual users code-switch, mixing languages with emojis. Communities create local memes and region-specific stickers."

Young people, she points out, are often skilled at visual storytelling. They understand pacing, sequencing and humour in compressed forms. “But the tradeoffs are real," she says. “Certain skills like long descriptive writing might weaken if not practised regularly." There’s another risk of relying too heavily on visual short-cuts: misinterpretation. Every few months, sections of the internet erupt in debate over what emojis actually mean—whether a thumbs-up is passive-aggressive, which heart colour is appropriate for which context, whether the purple heart signals solidarity or something more suggestive. The same symbol can shift meaning depending on generation, context or even the day of the week.

Renuka Ozarkar, a faculty member at the University of Mumbai’s linguistics department, believes the challenge lies in balance. “We need both abilities: to condense meaning and to expand and elaborate it when needed." The latter, she emphasises, requires “critical and serious engagement with ideas and texts. (Abbreviated exchanges) also begin to impose inadequate ideas of what ‘good’ or ‘effective’ communication is, if we start thinking that the shorter the reply, the better the communication."