Long debated as dangerous to the English language, the many acronyms and shorthand practices of instant messenger users could once day find a designation as its own language, if Kent State University researchers have their say.

A team of four undergrad researchers, under the direction of Drs. Pamela Takayoshi and Christina Haas, both associate professors of English at Kent, are currently examining the language of IM to find, among other things, whether Gen Y usage of IM speak could create language problems in the future.

The results, Takayoshi said, are more promising than problematic.

"Instant messaging, or IM, is not just bad grammar or a bunch of mistakes,” Takayoshi said. "IM is a separate language form from formal English and has a common set of language features and standards."

Using IM chats produced by college students, the group has identified what formerly looked like nonstandard features of standard written English are actually standardized features within the IM langage.

The language of instant messaging was consistently informal, explicit and playful in nature, researchers said, emphasizing "meaning over form and social relationships over content."

"When we look at the kinds of technology young people are using today," Haas said, "we see that many of those technologies — IM, blogs and Facebook — are writing technologies. Even the phone is used for writing now."

The research will continue as the group extends their analysis to Facebook, where the social networking site recently launched its own IM client.

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After the successful launch of its social-IM client, Facebook announced yesterday the company is building a Jabber/XMPP interface in an effort to expand usage of its Facebook Chat.

The end result, developer David Reiss said, is a wider playing field for new and seasoned users of Facebook's instant messaging feature.

"In the near future, users will be able to use Jabber/XMPP-based chat applications to connect to Facebook Chat," he said.

Once complete, users would be able to utilize a third-party client to communicate with their Facebook contacts, view online contacts, profile information and status messages. Currently, Facebook Chat only works upon signing-in to their social networking website.

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After months of waiting, Facebook IM has finally arrived on the social networking scene and is situated to become a must-use application for its users. But, just how well does Facebook perform versus its social competitor, MySpaceIM?

Check out our head-to-head preview of Facebook IM and then, decide for yourself!

Bonus for Digsby Users: Just announced, Digsby is the first third-party IM to feature support for FacebookIM. Now, rather than signing in to Facebook, Digsby users can use their favorite client to access all their Facebook friends! Sweet!

Haven't been able to find that perfect Mother's Day gift yet? Why not skip the materialism and go for a good conversation, like the ones AIM is offering for free this weekend?

AOL announced this week registered AIM users can make free calls to all their favorite moms (whether it be your own, your mother-in-law or other matriarch) using AIM's Call Out service.

Typically a pay-per-call service, AIM Call Out will allow users to make unlimited calls to more than 200 countries between 6 a.m. EST Saturday, May 10 and 4 a.m. EST Monday, May 12. Users must have at least $5 in non-refundable call credits in order to take advantage of this offer.

In this week's Reader's Mailbag, one reader seeks to bridge the language barrier via IM to find out more about her heritage.

Q: This is a weird question, but is there an easy way to translate IMs from one langage to another? I found kin living in France while researching my family tree and would love to communicate with them (their website provides screennames!) but I am not very fluent. --Heidi S., Florida

Dear Heidi,

I never really considered the language barriers over IM until your letter and luckily found a pretty neat application you can use to IM with your family in France.

IM Translator 3.0, for AIM, ICQ, Windows Live Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger, provide a pretty seamless experience for translating from a multitude of languages into English and back. With this application, you can select a message and with a single keystroke, IM Translator changes the text, such as "Parlez vous Anglais?" into "Do you speak English?"

Download the application for free or try the web-based version for quick translation without a download.

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