Linguistic Properties and Style
The primary motivation for the creation and use of SMS language was to convey a comprehensible message using the fewest number of characters possible. This was due (i) to the way in which telecommunication companies limited the number of characters per SMS, and also charged the user per SMS sent. To keep costs down, users had to find a way of being concise while still getting their message across. Further (ii) 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. In many countries, people now have access to unlimited text options in their monthly plan, although this varies widely from country to country, and operator to operator. However, screens are still small, which continues to motivate short messages and the input problem persists: SMS language is still widely used for brevity.
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 among many others. Although they are by no means exhaustive, some of these marked properties involve the use of:
- Initialisations (acronyms and abbreviations composed of initials)
- Reductions and shortenings, and omission of parts of speech
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- Pragmatics and context in interpretation of ambiguous shortenings
- Reactive tokens
- Pictograms and logograms (rebus abbreviation)
- Paralinguistic and prosodic features
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- Capitalization
- Emoticons
- Variations in spelling
- Punctuation, or lack thereof
Read more about this topic: SMS Language
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