Linguistic Features of English Textese and Digitalk of Iranian EFL Students

The emergence of technology has developed new ways of communication and created a significant variation in written languages. Text messaging is enjoying an irresistible popularity among the young people. This study aimed at investigating the textese of Iranian EFL learners written in English by scrutinizing the linguistic features through a qualitative design. In doing so, 700 messages were collected from 43 MA Iranian EFL learners of both genders. Using a coding scheme, the linguistic features were categorized and analyzed. The frequency and percentage of the textese were calculated and tabulated. The findings of the study showed that Iranian EFL students used different types of linguistic features with different density in their textese. They had consistency in textism and most of their text messaging language was standard. The most and least frequently used features were Emoticons and Accent Stylization, respectively. The findings of the study could be used by practitioners in the field to raise the students’ awareness on the linguistic features in choosing the right kind of the message, vocabulary, punctuation, abbreviations, etc. when communicating with others.