SMS as a new communication form

This paper focuses on sociolinguistic features of SMS (“short message service”) as a new communication form, which has become extremely popular in the last years. The author presents statistics and motivation for mobile phone use, analyses linguistic aspects of SMS-communication in English, German and Russian. The prevailing tendencies of SMS are reduction which is attributed both to technical restrictions of the medium and to the conceptually spoken character of its use, and creative language use.