Learning By Messaging: Teenagers' Mobile Phone Writing as a Metalinguistic Practice.

As is always the case, the diffusion of new technologies of communication gives rise to some shared commonsensical fears about their hypothetical negative effects on young people. The diffusion of the Short Message System (SMS) among teenagers is no exception. Typically it gave rise to some concerns about its role in lowering the linguistic competences of the young users of such a technology. More or less shared among parents and teachers, these worries seem to underestimate the great amount of metalinguistic work accomplished by teenagers to create and communicate through mobile phone’s SMS. The paper presents data of an ethnographic research on the language created by Italian teenagers to communicate each other via SMS. Analysing the linguistic features and the pragmatic functions of this language, it shows the extraordinary amount of metalinguistic work accomplished by teenagers on their natural language. This work on language is a permanent laboratory for cultural creation and linguistic evolution through which teenagers diffuse the distinctive feature of the contemporary digital revolution in everyday communication: the emergency of a new temporality of writing.