However, in the midst of
the media frenzy, linguistic and learning theorists have
become interested in an offshoot of this text messaging
'craze' - a written vocabulary that has emerged in its
wake . . . 'textese'.
Textese is an abbreviated vocabulary that includes
initialisms (e.g.lolfor laughing out loud), letter/number
homophones (e.g. gr8 for great), contractions or shortenings (e.g. cuzfor because), emoticons (symbols representing emotions (e.g.: (for sad), and the deletion of
unnecessary words, vowels, punctuation, and capitalization (Thurlow 2003; Carrington 2004;