SMS language
Short Message Service '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. 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
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. 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. Words can also be combined with numbers to make them shorter, 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 such as Symbian and language packs enable the linguistic localization of products that are equipped with such interfaces, where the final Symbian release 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 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.
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
- Reductions and shortenings, and omission of parts of speech
- Reactive tokens
- Pictograms and logograms
- Paralinguistic and prosodic features
- Variations in spelling
- Punctuation, or lack thereof
Initializations (acronyms and abbreviations composed of initials)
Reductions and shortenings, and omission of parts of speech
Sources:For words that have no common abbreviation, users most commonly remove the vowels from a word, and the reader is required to interpret a string of consonants by re-adding the vowels. Omission of words, especially function words are also employed as part of the effort to overcome time and space constraints.
The advent of predictive text input and smartphones featuring full QWERTY keyboards may contribute to a reduction in the use of shortenings in SMS language.
Pragmatics and context in interpretation of ambiguous shortenings
Recipients may have to interpret the abbreviated words depending on the context in which they are being used. For instance, should someone use ttyl, lol they may mean talk to you later, lots of love as opposed to talk to you later, laugh out loud. In another instance, if someone were to use omg, lol they may mean oh my god, laugh out loud as opposed to oh my god, lots of love.Therefore, context is crucial when interpreting, and it is precisely this shortfall that critics cite as a reason not to use it.
SMS language does not always obey or follow standard grammar, and additionally the words used are not usually found in standard dictionaries or recognized by language academies.
A 2024 study found that using abbreviations in texting makes the sender seem less sincere, and leads to fewer replies.
Reactive tokens
The feature of "reactive tokens" that is ubiquitous in Internet Relay Chat, is also commonly found in SMS language. Reactive tokens include phrases or words like "yeah I know", which signifies a reaction to a previous message. In SMS language, however, the difference is that many words are shortened unlike in spoken speech.Pictograms and logograms (rebus abbreviation)
Source:Some tokens of the SMS language can be likened to a rebus, using pictures and single letters or numbers to represent whole words.
The dialect has a few hieroglyphs and a range of face symbols.
Paralinguistic and prosodic features
Prosodic features in SMS language aim to provide added semantic and syntactic information and context from which recipients can use to deduce a more contextually relevant and accurate interpretation. These may aim to convey the textual equivalent of verbal prosodic features such as facial expression and tone of voice. Indeed, even though SMS language exists in the format of written text, it closely resembles normal speech in that it does not have a complicated structure and that its meaning is greatly contextualised.Capitalization
In the case of capitalization in SMS language, there are three scenarios:- No capitalization
- Capitalization of only the first word
- Full capitalization as appropriate that conforms to all grammatical rules
Emoji, asterisk emoting, and emoticons
Just as body language and facial expressions can alter how speech is perceived, emoji and emoticons can alter the meaning of a text message, the difference being that the real tone of the SMS sender is less easily discerned merely by the emoticon. Using a smiling face can be perceived as being sarcastic rather than happy, thus the reader has to decide which it is by looking at the whole message.Use of punctuation and capitalization to form emoticons distracts from the more traditional function of such features and symbols. Nevertheless, uses do differ across individuals and cultures. For example, overpunctuation may simply be used to communicate paralinguistic aspects of communication without the need to create an emotion from it like so: "Hello!!!!".
Punctuation, or lack thereof
While vowels and punctuation of words in SMS language are generally omitted, David Crystal observes that apostrophes occur unusually frequently. He cites an American study of 544 messages, where the occurrence of apostrophes in SMS language is approximately 35 percent. This is unexpected, seeing that it is a hassle to input an apostrophe in a text message with the multiple steps involved. The use of apostrophes cannot be attributed to users attempting to disambiguate words that might otherwise be misunderstood without it.There are few cases in English where leaving out the apostrophe causes misunderstanding of the message. For example, "we're" without the apostrophe could be misread as "were". Even so, these are mostly understood correctly despite being ambiguous, as readers can rely on other cues such as part of sentence and context where the word appears to decide what the word should be. For many other words like "Im" and "Shes", there is no ambiguity. Since users don't need to use apostrophes to ensure that their message is understood accurately, this phenomenon may in part be attributed to texters wanting to maintain clarity so that the message can be more easily understood in a shorter amount of time. The widespread mobile phone auto-correct feature contributes to the frequency of the apostrophe in SMS messages, since, even without user awareness, it will insert an apostrophe in many common words, such as "I'm", "I'll", and "I'd".