ABSTRACT
This chapter reports on the messaging practices of contributors to m4lit, a South African literacy project which aimed at promoting teens' reading and writing on a custom-designed mobile website with social network features. It addresses this gap by documenting how young people are appropriating writing in their mobile messaging practices. Sociolinguists have shown how, in South Africa, mobile discourse also draws on the 'medialect' associated internationally with text messaging and many other practices, including code-switching between English, African languages. The teens were recruited from Cape Town areas, Langa and Guguletu, and all had some form of mobile Internet access on a GPRS-enabled phone. Messages on kontax.mobi drew on the localised messaging practices discussed above characterised by non-standard orthographies, particularly for English words. Photo messaging was not possible on kontax.mobi, and an interest in sharing images with individuals rather than with the whole world may have inspired some of the requests for Mxit contact details posted on kontax mobi.
