The new English Project database of text messages

Texting has entered our lives with such speed and momentum in the last decade that for many of us, it now represents the preferred means of communicating brief, simple messages to others we are away from. On the back of increasingly convenient and versatile mobile technology, it offers a flexible and cheap form of direct contact.  Yet producing a text, as with other types of written communication, involves forming strings of words in sentences, making choices about spelling and style, and deciding what information is needed, and what is not.

David Crystal in his (2008) book Txtng: the gr8 db8  argues that ‘texting has added a new dimension to language use’ (p.20). However, despite the importance of texting in our everyday lives, we know little about this new dimension beyond the most basic observations.  We are familiar for example, with a number of features of text language: its abbreviated forms, pictograms and (lack of) punctuation. But what do we know of the choices we make as we construct a text message? How are we influenced in what we say by the person we are texting? How do we as individuals vary in the way we text, and why?

In this English Project texting project, we are aiming to collect a large amount of information about how we text. We are doing this in two ways. Firstly, we are working in collaboration with ITV Fixers volunteers to collect texts from as wide a range of the public as possible. Our volunteers will be conducting a face-to-face survey in twenty or so locations across the South Central region of England. They will be stopping passers-by and asking them to text a message in a given situation. The second way is through a quick and easy online survey which involves you answering a few simple survey questions and composing a short message for any of the three situations given on screen.

Our volunteers have been in Bath to collect data and will be back there next week and out and about across the south over the next month.

All the answers from the face-to-face survey and the on-line survey will be collated into one large database of texting language. This database will then be available for us to find out interesting facts, for example:

• How people across generations differ in the way they text
• How we adjust our text message depending on what we want to say
• How the content of our message leads to differences in the way we construct our message.

Add your texting DNA to the English Project database by clicking onto the on-line survey now.