Trumpųjų žinučių rašybos bruožai
Orthography of SMS

Summary/Abstract: The aim of the article is to describe orthographical features and functional properties of Lithuanian short messages. The data was derived from a corpus of 2060 messages written by 75 different senders of different age groups and various service providers. The material allows to get a full view of SMS orthography yet the sample is not representative thus the quantitative data is to be treated as preliminary.Earlier research in some other languages has shown that peculiarities of SMS language are mainly determined by their functions, i. e. SMS messaging is primarily used for informal immediate communication and for certain specific reasons related to technological and economic factors (limited SMS length, ease of text typing), entertainment as well as social identity and self-expression.The analysis of orthography of Lithuanian SMS has shown that although the authors have used many original ways of spelling, punctuation and typing, hardly any message was difficult to understand while many of the specific features could be explained by the authors’ attempts at brevity and speed of typing, e. g. replacing w with v and other nonstandard spelling. On the other hand, certain features which evidently appeared due to the limited message size, for example, avoidance of space after punctuation marks, have clearly become customary tosome of the senders because the majority of the messages do not reach the maximum size limit.The following specific features of orthography have been established: Lithuanian diacritics are seldom used; nonstandard spelling (v replaced with w, i with j, ks with x, other incorrect spelling); use of abbreviations (both traditional and new abbreviations, ommittance of parts of words, leaving out vowels, replacing parts of words with numerals); absence of capital letters; unpunctuated clauses and sentences; nonstandard typing (no spaces after punctuation marks). The Lithuanian SMS orthography is characterized by fewer specific features than the orthography of some other languages. For example, no acronyms and initialisms and homophones have been found in this material which may be explained by the different features of different languages.

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