Why Do You Text Like Thissss? Girl, You’re Drunnnk

It’s been happening for a whilllee, texters lengthening their verbage, and linguists are here to analyze. Using nearly 4 million words from students’ digital-communications data, a linguist at the University of Toronto has discovered this word elongating practice is a trend most common among female twenty-somethings (though it extends to different ages and across both genders as well). Vowels are the most frequently duplicated letters, and often words are only elongated by two or three letters at a time. More »