Exploring the Language of Informal English Text Messages

This study focused on a corpus of 100 informal English text messages obtained from 2 nonnative male and female professional English speakers during 2 months. The main aim of this study was to analyze the language of this kind of newly born language to see how senders express their concepts within a tiny cell phone screen and how receivers interpret them. Our findings revealed that abbreviation was the main genre applied in this mode of creative writing. For the sake of brevity, speed and convenience, use of incorrect grammar, incorrect punctuation and incorrect spelling found to be widespread. Besides, there were further shortening strategies utilized to have the fewest numbers of characters in each message. Additionally, common background knowledge was considered essential for decoding this somewhat secret language.