A Preliminary Linguistic Analysis of Romanized Persian SMS Messages

SMS (Short Message Service) messages have become a common means of communication throughout the world. With new colors and tones in the communication world, Romanized Persian (RP) is an emerging code employed by Iranian texters. The current study is to illuminate the main findings of a linguistic analysis of RP SMS messages written by Iranian cell phone users. To this end, a corpus of 719 RP SMS messages was collected manually from informants. The data were transcribed and analyzed linguistically. Analysis was based on some linguistic features found frequently among the SMS messages and examples related to each linguistic feature were described in detail. The findings revealed that there are several main characteristics including punctuation, omissions, consonant writing, graphical means and symbols, contractions, letter repetitions, loanwords, and letter-number homophones. The implications of the study concern the way cell phone users in Iran use the language of SMS in their messages as well as the common linguistic features of RP SMS messages. The paper concludes by promoting the approach to analysis taken in this study as a basis for future research into SMS communication in Iran and even in global contexts.