Textese (also known as chatspeak, texting language, or txt talk) is a term for the abbreviations and slang most commonly used among young people today. The of textese is largely due to the necessary brevity of mobile phone text messaging, though its use is also very common on the Internet, including e-mail and instant messaging.
There are no rules for writing textese. However, the common practice is to use single letters, pictures, or numbers to represent whole words. For example, “i <3 u” uses the picture of a heart “<3” for “love,” and the letter “u” to “you.” For words which have no common abbreviation, textese users often the vowels from a word, and the reader is forced to interpret a string of consonants by re-adding the vowels. Thus, “dictionary” becomes “dctnry,” and “keyboard” becomes “kybrd.” The reader must interpret the words depending on the context in which it is used, as there are many examples of words or phrases which use the same abbreviations. So if someone says “ttyl, lol” they probably mean “talk to you later, lots of love” not “talk to you later, laugh out loud,” and if someone says “omg, lol” they most mean “oh my god, laugh out loud” not “oh my god, lots of love.”
The emergence of textese is clearly due to a desire to type less and to communicate more than one can manage without such shortcuts. Yet it has been severely as “wrecking our language.” Some scholars even consider the use of textese as “irritating” and essentially lazy behavior. They’re worried that “sloppy” habits gained while using textese will result in students’ growing of proper spelling, grammar and punctuation.
