As the one exception, Thurlow (2003) examined the linguistic forms and communicative functions of youth’s text message use. Findings revealed that the primary linguistic changes that youth made (abbreviations, contractions, acronyms, misspellings and non-conventional spellings) were ‘serving the sociolinguistic “maxim” of (a) brevity and speed, (b) paralinguistic restitution and (c) phonological approximation’(Thurlow 2003: section 4).