In this essay I am going to explore how texts and multimedia speech are like spoken language and what attitudes people have towards texting and the language it portrays. I will also explore the way in which the language changes between different people and based on who the language is aimed for.
Texting has recently become one of the world’s most common way of communicating with roughly 75% of people who own a phone mostly text. Worldwide over 350 billion texts are sent each day, that’s roughly 67 texts per day sent by the average American teenager. Texting is one of the easiest ways of communication wether that is the traditional SMS or Facebook Chat or even Snapchat but we all know texting to come with many debates and disagreements over the language used.
One of the main features of multi-modal speech is vowel emission this is where the vowel is taken out of the word. For example if we look into Text B; can you send me the full address of home pls. We can see the use of pls at the end. Vowel emission is also used many times throughout the texts I have collected another example being Text G; Ok luv jst bn shop x x x . Jst and bn being the vowel emissed words here. Using vowel emission throughout texts gives a flash of informality, this meaning the chat between the sender and receiver wasn’t precisely formal, so using vowel emission makes a text message less formal and grammatically precise. It is therefore not similar to writing or speech as in both we do not miss out vowels in our own idiolects or as we write. It has been scientifically proven that the mind can automatically read words even if the vowels have been excluded. This then meaning it is another simple way to reduce the message size firstly to save time and reduce the cost as each message has a character limit, people are enable to adapt their language and it still make sense to everyone else reading the text.

Throughout the pieces of text I have received you can see the use of Initialism or the use of an acronym is shown . This is where the first letter of every word has been taken and put into one. For example in Text E; hi hun, wot time u need pckng up + wer asap x x x. Asap being the initialised word meaning ‘as soon as possible’. But this was not created by texting as this general saying has been around for many years before texting was invented, in the English language we use many abbreviations of words daily that we don’t think about, for example, ‘Bus’, ‘vet’ or even the word ‘Fridge’. But then again there is many initialisms used today in texting for example in Text D; lol, I haven’t done it :D LOL meaning “laugh out loud” or sometimes used as “lots of love” this is often misinterpreted by many adults and used as “lots of love” causing some confusion into what it actually means. In text it can also be seen as informal but in some cases some can be used in a formal matter. People have adapted the way they would usually talk to ensure their messages fit into the character limit and reduce time. In writing you rarely use acronyms but in speech I feel it does have a large impact in which it manages to get into our everyday conversations with people using “LOL” or “brb” in a face-to-face conversation.

One major debatable feature of texting is Non-standard spelling. In this you spell the word how you would say it, for example ‘luv’, ‘wen’, ‘wot’ or ‘prob’. Over all in my selection of texts non-standard spelling was used an astonishing 14 times and included words like ‘sed’ and ‘dats’ instead of ‘that’s’. Use of non-standard spelling increases informality dramatically as we can see in Text 6: I dunno ppl sed u were dats all. This message was clearly aimed for a friend or someone of the same age and not someone of importance. Non-standard spelling is often used to reduce time and dramatically reduce characters sent in a text message. But Non-standard spellings in text have caused one of the biggest debates about texting. Many linguists have argued over