Teenagers' new language in text messaging : attitudes towards coded forms

Abstract EN

A bunch of scholarly investigations were conducted on the language being used by people in text messaging in mobile phones.

It is apparent that it results in the innovation of codes which have affected the syntactic features of languages.

In this sense, the current study sought to explore the new integrated linguistic features employed by Algerian teenagers in their messages.

The second aim is to examine this new phenomenon where the structure of the language is a mixture of dialectal Arabic, French language and coded forms written in Latin scripts.

The study also pursues to provide an in-depth look on the attitudes of the teenagers towards the inclusion of these new codes and the motives behind their introduction.

To this end, the sample was chosen randomly from Tlemcen society for the questionnaire and about 50 texts were selected from the participants.

The findings showed that teenagers develop a special register called textese to show their solidarity.

Most importantly, the analysis of the texts demonstrated that the use of these textese affect their language performance.