OMG, DNT U KN W@ LOL means?

If not, a team of researchers at the University of Montreal hope they can give you the 411.

Professor Patrick Drouin is spearheading the Canadian arm of an international study that is investigating the language of text messaging.

According to Drouin, he expects to replicate the findings of the Belgian researchers who began the study, who concluded that text messaging (or short message service -- SMS -- as it's also known) is an ever-evolving and creative mode of communication.

"What they found is that there are various written forms for the same word. They also found variation at the syntax level, and the morphology of words," Drouin told CTV.ca in a telephone interview from Montreal.

"So they found that the language of SMS is something very, very rich from a lexicon point of view. They found that it's hard to say the language of SMS, because there seems to be more than one language of SMS...It's hard for them to say we'll publish a dictionary of SMS, because there's no such thing as a dictionary, it's moving continuously. So we expect to find a similar thing."

To get the project, named Texto4Science, underway, Drouin needs Canadians to send him their text messages.

He says they must be text messages that they have written and sent to another person and not written expressly for his project. Messages can be forwarded to a short code number: 202202.

For now, Drouin only needs French messages, 300,000 of them to be precise, which he will collect until April 30, 2010. He hopes to have a preliminary report completed by summer, with final results by the fall. He hopes to get an English project underway next year.

The research teams from around the world will eventually compile their findings for a final report, Drouin said.

One thing none of the groups will do, he said, is pass judgment on the language used for text messaging or determine whether it enhances or compromises written or spoken language.

However, he believes looking at the richness of text messaging language, and how users often have a variety of ways to say the same thing, will give people a new appreciation for a mode of communication that can appear juvenile or shallow.

"One judgment that we do hear quite a bit is that younger people don't know how to write," Drouin said. "And what I'm seeing is that they write a lot more than we did when I was their age. They blog, they text, they chat online, they are continuously writing, and the fact that they write quite a bit might give them some creativity in the actual expression of language that we don't have."

Anyone who submits a text message will also fill out an online form at www.texto4science.ca to provide information such as their first language, their age and their postal code. The researchers will use this information to compare how text messaging language differs from one region to another, or among different age groups.

But Drouin said no personal information, such as names, addresses or phone numbers, will be stored in their server.

And while Drouin and his team are analyzing the language, machine translation specialist Philippe Langlais will work on a tool that will translate the text messages to standardized French, and then perhaps translate standard French text into SMS language, to determine how many ways there really are to say the same thing.

According to Drouin, establishing what SMS language looks like today will allow researchers to follow how it evolves over time.

"Maybe in 10 years or five years or two years we can perform the same study and then discover something quite interesting."