Hihi kiss ; * : A study of the language in text messages by Swedish students in lower secondary school

This study is about language use in text messaging. In this study there are 338 text messages: 206 of them written by girls and 132 written by boys. The informants in the study are 16 years old and they live in the countryside on the outskirts of a small town in southern Sweden. The purpose of this study was to investigate characteristic linguistic features in the messages, in order to determine what significant meaning an emoticon such as a smiley brings to a text and further, to explore what speech acts smileys occur in. The results show that the language in the messages is a mix of spoken and written language. The characteristic features that were found in the messages were short sentences, onomatopoetic expressions, words written in capital letters, English expressions and use of smileys. Most of the speech acts in the messages were expressions of feelings or attitude. In the investigated corpus, 181 emoticons were found, scrutinized and placed into categories, which show various kinds of implicit information. The girls have used 97 emoticons and the boys 84. The most common emoticon was , which appeared 66 times in the messages and mostly served the purpose of making the message nice and friendly and sometimes to alleviate a direction. The reason for using emoticons in text messages was to bring life to it by expressing feelings, without an emoticon the true emotion of the message can easily be misunderstood.