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“They may use a homophone, such as gr8 for great, or an initial, like, LOL for laugh out loud,” Northwestern researcher Drew Cingel explained in a statement. Other shortcuts include dropping non-essential letters, such as changing the word “would” to “wud.”

In other words, if you send your kid a lot of texts with word adaptations, then he or she will probably imitate it,”

These adaptations could affect their offline language skills that are important to language development and grammar skills, as well.”

Ontario's Waterloo University is one of the few post-secondary institutions in Canada to require the students they accept to pass an exam testing their English language skills. Almost a third of those students are failing.

Barrett says the failure rate has jumped five percentage points in the past few years, up to 30 per cent from 25 per cent.

"Little happy faces ... or a sad face ... little abbreviations," show up even in letters of academic appeal, says Khan Hemani. "Instead of 'because', it's 'cuz'. That's one I see fairly frequently," she says, and these are new in the past five years.