Short Message Service (SMS) language or textese is the abbreviated language and slang commonly used in the late 1990s and early 2000s with mobile phone text messaging, and occasionally through Internet-based communication such as email and instant messaging. Many call the words used in texting "textisms" or "Internet slang." Features of early mobile phone messaging encouraged users to use abbreviations. 2G technology made text entry difficult, requiring multiple key presses on a small keypad to generate each letter, and messages were generally limited to 160 bytes (or 1280 bits). Additionally, SMS language made text messages quicker to type, while also avoiding additional charges from mobile network providers for lengthy messages exceeding 160 characters.
History SMS language is similar to telegraphs' language where charges were by the word. It seeks to use the fewest letters to produce ultra-concise words and sentiments in dealing with the space, time, and cost constraints of text messaging. It follows from how early SMS permitted only 160 characters and that carriers began charging a small fee for each message sent (and sometimes received). Together with the difficulty and inefficiency in creating messages, it led the desire for a more economical language for the new medium. SMS language also shares some of these characteristics with Internet slang and Telex speak, as it evolved alongside the use of shorthand in Internet chat rooms. Likewise, such a change sought to accommodate the small number of characters allowed per message, and to increase convenience for the time-consuming and often small keyboards on mobile phones. Similar elliptical styles of writing can be traced to the days of telegraphese 120 years back, when telegraph operators were reported to use abbreviations similar to modern text when chatting amongst themselves in between the sending of official messages. Faramerz Dabhoiwala wrote in The Guardian in 2016: "modern usages that horrify linguistic purists in fact have deep historical roots. 'OMG' was used by a septuagenarian naval hero, admiral of the fleet John Fisher, 1st Baron Fisher in a letter to Winston Churchill, in 1917". In general, SMS language thus permits the sender to type less and communicate more quickly than one could without such shortcuts. One example is the use of "tmr" instead of "tomorrow". Nevertheless, there are no standard rules for the creation and use of SMS languages. Any word may be shortened (for example, "text" to "txt"). Words can also be combined with numbers to make them shorter (for example, "later" to "l8r"), using the numeral "8" for its homophonic quality.
SMS language as a multilingual entity
Some may view SMS language to be a dialect of the English language, that is a dialect strongly if not completely derivative of the English language. This may not be so. Such generalization may have risen from the fact that mobile phones had only been able to support a limited number of default languages in the early stages of its conception and distribution. A mobile operating system (OS) such as Symbian and language packs enable the linguistic localization of products that are equipped with such interfaces, where the final Symbian release (Symbian Belle) supported the scripts and orthographies of over 48 languages and dialects, though such provisions are by no means fully comprehensive as to the languages used by users all over the world. Nevertheless, various factors contribute as additional constraints to the use of non-English languages and scripts in SMS. This motivates the anglicization of such languages, especially those using non-Latin orthographies (i.e. not using Latin alphabets) following for instance, the even more limited message lengths involved when using for example, Cyrillic or Greek letters. On the other side, researcher Gillian Perrett observes the de-anglicization of the English language following its use and incorporation into non-English linguistic contexts. As such, on top of the measures taken to minimize space, time and cost constraints in SMS language, further constraints upon the varied nature and characteristics of languages worldwide add to the distinct properties and style of SMS language(s).
Linguistic properties and style The primary motivation for the creation and use of SMS language was to convey a comprehensible message using the fewest characters possible. This was for two reasons: first of all, telecommunication companies limited the number of characters per SMS and charged the user per SMS sent. To keep costs down, users had to find a way of being concise while still communicating the desired message. Secondly, typing on a phone is normally slower than with a keyboard, and capitalization is even slower. As a result, punctuation, grammar, and capitalization are largely ignored. The advent of touchscreen phones with large screens, swipe-based input methods and increasingly advanced autocomplete and spelling suggestion functionality, as well as the increasing popularity of free-to-use instant messaging systems like WhatsApp over pay-per-message SMS has decreased the need to use SMS language. Observations and classifications as to the linguistic and stylistic properties of SMS language have been made and proposed by Crispin Thurlow, López Rúa, and David Crystal. Although they are by no means exhaustive, some of these properties involve the use of:
Initializations (acronyms and abbreviations composed of initials) Reductions and shortenings, and omission of parts of speech Pragmatics and context in interpretation of ambiguous shortenings Reactive tokens Pictograms and logograms (rebus abbreviation) Paralinguistic and prosodic features Capitalization Emoticons Variations in spelling Punctuation, or lack thereof
Initializations (acronyms and abbreviations composed of initials) There are many examples of words or phrases that share the same abbreviations (e.g., lol could mean laugh out loud, lots of love, or little old lady, and cryn could mean crayon or cryin(g)).
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