The presentation focuses on the economisation of the English language in computer-mediated communication.Data is analysed from non-native English-speaking students on an online MA programme in English Linguisticsrun by a Swedish university. The data comprises text chatlogs from pre-seminar discussions involving thestudents only and seminars with their native English-speaking teachers on the introduction to English linguisticsthat is the first course on the programme. The students are mostly Vietnamese native speakers, apart from oneBangla speaker, and are inexperienced Internet users even in their native languages. Thus, they are unlikely tohave been aware of native speaker norms for Internet discourse. As a result, it is interesting to analyse thedevelopment of their language use in textchat.We analyse variations in students’ development of so-called reduced forms (reductions in orthography,morphology or formality of lexemes or phrases). The types of reduced forms in terms of word-class are analysedacross the introduction to linguistics course. Many more appear in more discussion-oriented topics like therelation between language and gender compared to more core theoretical linguistic topics like syntax. Thenumbers of functional and lexical categories is almost equal, with lexical categories slightly ahead. Regardingfunctional categories, interjections and pronouns are by far the most common. Given the oral and interactivenature of textchat, this is not surprising. Both variations regarding individual words for all students, andvariations in individual students’ reductions, are discussed. We find that in both cases students are regular intheir reductions, with similar processes appearing for individual words and for individual students, althoughthere is variation in the processes involved. Thus, this is evidence that textchat offers many opportunities forusers to individually economise their language.