For many, text messaging, or SMS, is essential to the way we live, while for others it is a baffling, irritating new medium of communication.

Texting has created an abbreviated way of speaking. You can abbreviate using symbols (like GR8 for "great", and L8R for "later"). Common phrases can be abbreviated by just using the initial letters (B4N "bye for now") and we can use emoticons to convey our mood. Around the world more than 2 billion users regularly send and receive text messages. Texting can mobilise social action on a mass scale. Political and advertising campaigns, news, weather, stock prices, entertainment, horoscopes, travel advice and even intruder alarms are delivered by SMS. Corey Worthington's notorious open-house party and the Cronulla riots were said to have been co-ordinated by people sending one another text messages. On a smaller scale, friends have extended conversations involving many messages back and forth over hours and days. The role of texting is expanding into areas way beyond its original purpose of assisting the deaf. The problem that many people see is that all these abbreviations are corrupting our language. It is the thin edge of the wedge that in time will see the language of Shakespeare turned into alphabet soup. Is there any good reason to think this will happen? No, not when we recognise that texting language came about due to the constraints of the medium. Who would not want to abbreviate when you are constrained to 160 characters per message, and you have to write it laboriously with a telephone keypad? If you can leave out letters from words and still have them make sense, so much the better for busy people. Remove the constraints and the abbreviations will mostly lose their reason to be. Some abbreviations may cross over to other uses, but this is likely to be only a minor trend. The linguist David Crystal in his recent book Txtng: The GR8 DB8 explodes the myth that texting is corrupting English when he points out that less than 10 per cent of the words in text messages use abbreviated forms. Most of the words in the average text message use standard spelling. Crystal says that using abbreviations has been common practice from when English was a dialect of old Saxon, 1000 years ago. People in a hurry have always wanted shorthand ways of saying things. Much of the concern about the effect of texting on the language seems to go back to a report in the British media in 2003, which was reported in Australia at the time. You might remember that a child was supposed to have handed in a school essay written entirely in text-speak. Talkback radio, print and TV had a field day with the story. The only problem is, as David Crystal found after searching the archives, it never actually happened. It was an urban myth, much like the myth that English is in decline due to the abuses of technology. It is what it needs to be for the times, and as a global language is stronger than ever.