“Where Are You?” The Communicative Functions of Saudi Students’ Text Messaging

Abstract

The widespread use of the mobile phone service has greatly contributed to the proliferation of text messaging, particularly among young people. The main objective of this study is to examine the communicative functions of the text messaging of young Saudi university students. Thurlow's (2003) theoretical framework is used in this study. The study has a straightforward research question: What are the communicative functions of young Saudi students' text messaging? 750 text messages were collected from the participants. The data collected were coded based on their communicative functions. Five main categories of communicative functions emerged from the data, namely friendship maintenance, socialization, school collaboration, coordination, and exchange of information. The findings of the present study corroborate previous findings about communicative functions in text messaging.