The idea of SMS – short message service began to be discussed in the the beginning of the 1980s, but the companies started to develop its commercial possibilities only in the early 1990s. However, the initial growth was slow as the companies could not work out the reliable systems of charging for this service. In 1995 there were only 0.4 messages on average per GSM customer per month.

But once procedures were in place the texting skyrocketed. By the end of 2000, the average number of messages reached 35 per user per month, and on Christmas Day 2006, over 205m texts went out in the UK alone.

Today, this service is used by 74% of all mobile phone subscribers, or 2.4 billion people.

In some languages SMS is used as a synonym for a text message, or even a verb, though technically speaking SMS is a certain communication protocol, and some companies use different protocols for sending and receiving text messages.

Over the years, the certain language known as SMS language (chatspeak, txt, txtspk, txtk, texting language or txt talk) developed. In 2003 there were reports about a teenager who had written an essay so full of txtspk that her teacher could not understand it. The extracts were posted online, but no one ever saw the entire essay.

The text speak is very similar to rebus – the single letters or digits replace the words or syllables. For example, b = be, r = are, y = why, l8r = later, 4 = for, 2mro = tomorrow, etc.

Many people believe that text speak is wreaking English, however, such elliptical styles of writing and usage of abbreviations, initial letters for whole words, initializing of common phrases and logograms is not at all new and dates back to at least the days of telegraphese. Some of these nonstandard forms are so much part of English that they’ve been included in the Oxford English Dictionary: e.g., “cos” in 1828, and “wot” in 1829.

See the examples of text speak