I voted 'English with no capitals', but that's not exactly what I do.
I surely use LOL, re, and such 'words' quite often. Less often I use 'I'm gonna', 'I wanna', 'yeah' or 'yep', (which I find very funny btw [that too, depending on the situation though]) and stuff like this, and for some reason I always say goodbye as 'see ya'.
I never use 4eva, luv u or any of that supposed 'teen chatspeak'.
Capitalizing depends... When I chat I almost always capitalize, except for the beginning of a sentence and for I, which I capitalize in a very strange way:
I don't capitalize it in the beginning of a sentence,
I don't capitalize it when I'm writing only one sentence,
I do capitalize it in the second sentence of a message-to-be-sent:
<AnnaBtG> oh, i didn't know
<AnnaBtG> i didn't know. I thought it had happened by accident.
Same with periods. I never put one if it's only one sentence, but if they are more in a message-to-be-sent I put periods in all of them.
The rest of the punctuation I use in a normal way.
As a non-native English speaker, my English grammar and vocabulary could surely be better, but 1) I'm a perfeccionist, 2) I hate mistakes or people that make mistakes especially when speaking, 3) I want to be taken in seriously (something that can't be always easy in a society where most of the people are at least ten years older than me, no offence anyone). So, I always use the best of my grammar when chatting. Sometimes I even want to reply to something that was written by someone else, I write what I want to say, then realize I've made mistakes and try to correct them, and it finally takes me so long I finally don't say it at all :rolleyes:
I don't commit typos often, but when I do I edit them using *'s. My mistakes are usually misspellings of words I don't know well and I'm not in the mood to check in the dictionary.
When I post on the boards, OTOH, or write e-mails I'm more strict. I would never leave something un-capitalized or un-punctuated and I always check the dictionary for words I don't know. But I'm still kinda 'light' with it, as I know the little of this that I occasionally do doesn't annoy people.
The only thing I am extremely, awfully, very, very, very, very strict with is writing fics. I try to use the best of my language knowledge there.
So, in general, I agree with most of the people that posted here. Chatspeak irritates me and I don't use it, except for some expressions that are 'standard'.
After all, my English is problematic anyway... if I used chatspeak too nobody would understand what I would be saying!
AnnaBtG. (wondering if all this babbling made any sense)
P.S.: I chat with a girl from New York. She has some problem with typing, I don't know exactly what (she never told me, and I wouldn't want to be indiscreet). I swear, if I didn't know she has this problem, I would never talk to her anymore. It's giving me a hard time to understand what she means by 'hi wuzzup i went to teh moveis tonitgh an it was fun'.
P.P.S.: I commit many 'typos' when speaking. On Tuesday I nearly asked for 'ticket buses' instead of 'bus tickets'!!
