Although many texters enjoy breaking linguistic rules, they also know they need to be understood.

Spellings are made by people. Dictionaries - eventually - reflect popular choices.

Sending a message on a mobile phone is not the most natural of ways to communicate. The keypad isn't linguistically sensible.

Several of us linguists at that time would record our own kids, just to get some data. There was some literature on it then, but no day-by-day, blow-by-blow examples. I recorded all my children over the years in some shape or form. It's what linguists do. You don't talk to a linguist without having what you say taken down and used in evidence against you at some point in time.

Grammar is what gives sense to language .... sentences make words yield up their meaning. Sentences actively create sense in language. And the business of the study of sentences is grammar.

Language itself changes slowly but the internet has speeded up the process of those changes so you notice them more quickly.

In effect we are, bending and breaking the rules of the language. And if someone were to ask why we do it, the answer is simply: for fun