Understanding the discourse of text messaging has profound implications for society. SMS text messaging has impacted considerably on how we communicate with others. Negative, sometimes alarmist media coverage continues to fuel debate surrounding its 'damaging' effects on language and literacy, yet these portrayals tend to be based on extreme or fictionalised accounts of text messaging. What kind of language do people really use when they text. Drawing on a range of academic sources from various fields, this book describes the language used in a corpus of over 11,000 text messages, as yet the largest collection in the UK. In particular, the book shows how the discourse of text messaging is shaped by users’ often creative responses to the functions and constraints of the medium. This is an essential book for upper level undergraduates and postgraduates studying discourse analysis, as well as educators wanting to understand this important new form of discourse.

'The Discourse of Text Messaging is a pleasure to read. A detailed analysis of a corpus of text messages reveals how people deploy all the resources of language - from spellings and punctuation through to grammar and discourse markers - to create meanings, to construct identities and to generally ‘get things done’. The wide-ranging analyses are clearly explained and engagingly written about throughout.'David Barton, Professor of Language and Literacy, Lancaster University, UK

Chapter 1: Situating text messaging: what, who, how and why \ Chapter 2: Issues in Collecting Data \ Chapter 3: Respellings in Text Messaging \ Chapter 4: The Grammar of Text Messaging \ Chapter 5: Spoken Discourse Markers in Text Messaging \ Chapter 6: Frequent Words and Phrases in Text Messaging \ Chapter 7: Everyday Creativity in Text Messaging \ Chapter 8: Performing Identity through Text Messaging \ Chapter 9: Text messaging in the World: the State of the Art and its Future \ Bibliography \ Index