In an attempt to examine the linguistic forms and communicative functions of youth‘s text
message patronage, Thurlow (2003) finds out that the major linguistic changes that youth
brought about (i.e. abbreviations, contractions, misspellings and non-conventional spellings,
acronyms, etc) were ―serving the sociolinguistic ‗maxims‘ of (a) brevity and speed, (b)
paralinguistic restitution and (c) phonological approximation‖. Language experts believe that
these new trends were linguistically ―unremarkable‖ and also ―would not be out of place on a
scribbled note left on the fridge door‖ (section 4).