The future of text language is… QWERTY?

So I’ve reappeared from my holdiay cocoon and started thinking again… slowly though. The latest fascination with my iPhone has brought about a question for me. 

Will the increasingly common QWERTY keyboard on our mobile devices change our SMS language habits?

When I think about the basic objective of text language, it is to display a message using the least number of characters.  But this language has also evolved out of ease and convenience on the sender’s part, determined in part by the location of characters on their phones.  Initally I thought that our habits would not change, but when I look at things a bit more deeply I’m tempted to suggest otherwise.  I think the higher resolution screens and toggling required (on an iPhone at least) to move between text and numbers may mean that people can see more on their screen, and language combining letters and numbers will be harder to create quickly. 

Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeffk42/

There’s also another dimension too. Do we type differently on a QWERTY keyboard because we generally use them in different situations? Will our less mobile habits travel to our mobile devices? Being able to see previous messages on the screen makes our texts feel more like a conversation that would take place on instant messenger. I think this might be what “they” want us to do, afterall SMSing on our iPhones looks a little like iChat according to some, and can further our well developed and sometimes costly habit of text messaging anytime, anywhere. Perhaps the advances in text message conversations are developing our  preference to SMS on our phones rather that actually using the phone as… well… a phone (my suggestion surely implies my age, remembering a time when mobile phones were a luxury and text messaging did not exist).

Photo:http://www.flickr.com/photos/lonelybob/755466763/

My suggestion is that we aren’t going to stop abbreviating (sorry language puritans, I can’t concede this one), we are just going to see another development in evolution of way we use language characters to communicate. We’ll see different abbreviations with an increased sense of immediacy as SMS emulates instant messaging behaviours.  I’d suggest that for this one at least, the tools at hand will shape our behaviour.