Effects of Phonological Features on Texting Styles: Future Directions

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate the effect of phonological features on online written text messages. Data were collected from ninety ESL Indian students at Aligarh Muslim University with regards to their Facebook-based chats. The dataset was fed into SPSS for analysis. Major findings showed that the respondents tend to use vowel deletion, the substitution of numbers for phones, words represented by a single letter and overuse of sounds to represent phonology in their written text messages. With this in mind, the study yielded evidence that texting reverses the previous studies that spelling first and then phonology. That is to say, this study revealed that phonology affects the way of writing online text messages. This study also showed that phonology is used in the written forms and that Facebook users sometimes reject to follow the standard spelling of English and write the words as they are pronounced, not as they are written in standard English.

Keywords: internet linguistics, netSpeak, phonetic spelling, phonological features, textSpeak, Webspeak