They evolved not only to save character space but also to reduce typing efforts. The character-reducing strategies inherent to textese are referred to as textisms (Carrington, 2004 Lyddy et al. Textese has been called ‘squeeze text’, which well reflects its grammatical features (Carrington, 2004). Character reduction as performed in textese, can be achieved not only by minimizing the number of words but also by abbreviating words and using shorter synonyms and symbols. In text messages, on the other hand, one is obliged to conserve character space, which results in a different practice of economy (Frehner, 2008).

In other words, a cost-effective telegram contains as few words as possible. However, a crucial difference is the nature of the length restriction: In telegrams, the costs are related to the number of words and not the number of characters. Textese and telegraphese are both characterized by an imposed limit constraint (Barton, 1998 Drouin and Driver, 2014 Isserlin, 1985 Tesak and Dittmann, 2009). A more contemporary example of an elliptic style is textese, which is often used in modern text messages (Drouin and Driver, 2014). For instance, the advent of the telegraph, in which words were literally at a premium, necessitated an elliptic style that has become known as telegram style of telegraphese, which is viewed as a normal expressive form of language (Barton, 1998 Isserlin, 1985 Tesak and Dittmann, 2009). These limitations are sometimes so restrictive that they impact sentence structure and content and word forms. For example, there are word count limitations to newspaper headlines, advertisements, journalistic articles, student papers, and scholarly manuscripts. Spontaneous linguistic communication is typically unrestrained in terms of the length of utterances but in some situations there are constraints on utterance length. The results show that online language producers adapt their texts to overcome limit constraints. Consequently, they represent more informal language usage (e.g., internet slang) in turn, post-CLC tweets contained relatively more articles, conjunctions, and prepositions. (II) Token analysis: the relative frequency of tokens and bigrams (III) part-of-speech analysis: the grammatical structure of the sentences in tweets (i.e., adjectives, adverbs, articles, conjunctives, interjections, nouns, prepositions, pronouns, and verbs) pre-CLC tweets showed relatively more textisms, which are used to abbreviate and conserve character space. Three separate analyses were performed: (I) general analysis: the number of characters, words, and sentences per tweet, as well as the average word and sentence length. Pre-CLC tweets were compared with post-CLC tweets. We asked whether the character limit change (CLC) affected language usage in Dutch tweets and hypothesized that there would be a reduction in the need for character-conserving writing styles. This provided an opportunity for researchers to investigate the linguistic effects of length constraints in online communication. In November 2017 Twitter doubled the available character space from 140 to 280 characters.

Twitter word counter