A new report from England, on the effects of texting on literacy, will be of some comfort to Italy’s cultural guardians. The study, conducted at the the department of communication and science at City University in London, found that there were no significant differences in the instances of grammar and spelling mistakes between two groups of children, mobile phone users familiar with txt messaging and those without, aged between 11 & 12. The children, according to speech and language therapist Veenal Raval, were able to ‘code-switch’, or slip between different modes of communication – just as they do between playground slang and formal speech. Italy has some 62.7 million mobile phones in a population of 58 million.

Text messaging had developed its own lingo in Italian as well as English, with abbreviations like
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