They do not write English in tweets, SMSs, etc?
Hv u nvr had need to rd a txt fr a teen? Srsly they look lk ths. lol
So I'm actually teaching a class on electronically-mediated communication this semester, so I have this information right at hand: in a 2005 study of texts from teenagers, a total of 6.5% of words were abbreviated.
That's certainly interesting, but an eight-year-old study about a field that's not even fifteen years old could not even be described as stale.
True, but:
(1) it's not like there are many more recent studies of this
particular question out there (though I do have one of IM messages from 2008, which found 2.4% abbreviations and "characteristic IM forms");
(2) at least it gives us a baseline for a quantity that we can calibrate our expectations around;
(3) the
stereotype embodied by your example above was no less prevalent in 2005 than it is now;
(4) there's no particular reason to suppose that the rate of use of abbreviations in texting has substantially increased since 2005, and many reasons to suspect it may have decreased with the advent of smartphones with features like autocorrect;
(5) at the end of the semester I may be able to give you an update, since one of my students is writing his term paper on the use of abbreviations;
(6) in a cursory random subsample of 400 words of the corpus of text messages my students have collected, I found at most 15 abbreviations, counting as generously as possible.