Text lit.

• Author: Freund, Charles Paul
• Position: Artifact - Text messaging; literature of the future - Brief Article

THIS COMMON CELL phone may strike you as unremarkable, a familiar telecom device that, in this photo, is displaying the text message,"Yeah, yeah. Sure, sure. Whatever." But look again, because this device is morphing into something different: a linguistic and literary influence.

This winter, a French writer named Phil Marso published a short novel aimed at young readers and written entirely in France's own intricately developed cellphonic argot. It's an anti-smoking story titled Pa Sage a Taba (Smoking Isn't Smart). Agence France Presse has quoted a passage from Marso's text: "6j t'aspRge d'O 2 kologne histoar 2 partaG le odeurs ke tu me fe subir?" ("What if I spray you with cologne so you can share the smells you make me suffer?")

It's notable that the...