Tell me what texters you are, I'll tell you if you're creative

International audienceThe SMS is one of the new communication technologies. In just a few years, it has become an important part of our everyday life. In fact, in France, at least 100% of adolescents aged from 12 to 24 send text messages, and they send an average of 435 SMS per week (Bigot & Croute, 2012). The written forms of SMS diverge from those of traditional forms of writing. From the scientific viewpoint, research on SMS has provided new data for answering a number of questions about language. A lot of studies have especially looked into the relationship between SMS-specific forms, and spelling in traditional writing. Is this language creative? In this study, we are looking at the relationship between the use of textims (a change in a word’s orthographic form as compared to traditional writing) and the creative potential of the writters.We compiled two corpora produced by undergraduates: 285 elicited and 580 naturalistics text messages. We are interested on two types of textisms: (1) those consistent and those breaking with traditional written code. Moreover, we evaluate the creative potential of each undergraduate with EPoC (Lubart, Besançon & Barbot, 2011). So four scores of creative potential characterize undergraduates (graphic and verbal divergent thinking; graphic et verbal integrative thinking).Results showed negative correlations between the level of creativity and the density of textims especially texters who have a higher score in divergent thinking, produced fewer textims breaking with traditional written code