Researcher Christian Guilbault (above) is part of a research project called Text4Science that’s looking at the language of test messaging.

And he’s asking the public to get involved in the name of science by forwarding some of their old text messages via cellphone to 202202 and then completing an online survey at text4science.ca.

“We hope to see how text messages change with languages and dialects,” says Guilbault, an associate professor with SFU’s French department. “There are some differences between the French used in France and in Quebec, so we expect to see significant differences between different dialects of English.

Guilbault says the project hopes to show that, contrary to popular belief, people who use abbreviations and shortcuts when writing text messages are not lazy or illiterate, but rather creative and imaginative in their use of language.

“It’s also worth mentioning that young people have never written as much as they are now using this technology,” he says.

“When I was young, I only had to write when doing homework or to send a letter to someone. Young people today write all day long using text messaging, email, Facebook, Twitter and blogs.”