WeChat is popular in China, Line is big in Japan, and WhatsApp... Well, it's WhatsApp. It has 2 million users. But in these apps, messages travel over the internet rather than over phone lines like SMS texts and, interestingly, the United States is one of the few big countries where SMS, the texting technology with origins in the 1980s, remains a standard way to chat.
As Shira Ovide highlighted in The New York Times, America's SMS exceptionalism has its pros and cons. The biggest benefits of SMS are that it works on almost any phone, and people are not locked into one company's communications world. The drag, however, is that SMS has security flaws, and it lacks features of modern chat apps like notifications that your friend has read your message, or the ability to start a video call from a text.
Many people also think that texting is bad because it makes us lazy in the way we speak, but language guru David Crystal thinks that it's causing neither bad spelling nor moral decay.
The UK's leading linguistic academic told The Guardian, "Almost every basic principle that people hold about texting turns out to be misconceived."
"Misspelling isn't universal: analysis shows that only 10% of words used in texts are misspelled. Nor are most texts sent by kids: 80% are sent by businesses and adults," Crystal explained.
"Likewise, there is no evidence that texting teaches people to spell badly: rather, research shows that those kids who text frequently are more likely to be the most literate and the best spellers, because you have to know how to manipulate language."
According to Crystal, if you can't spell a word, then you don't really know whether it's cool to misspell it in the first place.
"Kids have a very precise idea of context - none of those I have spoken to would dream of using text abbreviations in their exams - they know they would be marked down for it."
Of course, changing public opinion is hard work, but Crystal is hopeful he can convert the linguistic reactionaries.
"The reality is that people have always had a tremendous fear about the impact of new technology on language," Crystal said.
"When the printing press was first invented, people thought it was an instrument of the devil that would spawn unauthorized versions of the Bible. The telephone created fears of a breakdown in family life, with people no longer speaking directly to one another. And radio and television raised concerns about brainwashing.
