Due to the lack of time for planning contributionsin online discourse, especially textchat,language is often economised. The strategies used have been considered by many authors,suchas,Werry (1996), Murray (2000), Lee (2002), and Lotherington and Xu (2004), among others,with both grammatical processeslike ellipsis and orthographical/morphological oneslikeclipping being discussed. Our presentation looksin more detail at these, and arguesthat they areevidence that an online community of practice (Lave andWenger 1991,Wenger 1998) hasformed. Our data comesfrom text chatlogsinvolving non-native speakers of English fromseminars on an MAintroduction to linguistics. One student is a speaker ofBangla and the restare speakers of Vietnamese. The chatlogs comesfrom student-only pre-seminars as well astheseminars with the teachers on the course.We will argue that ellipsis exhibitsfeatures ofinteraction like Intersubjectivity (Darhower 2002) and Greetings and Self-initiatedCorrection(Peterson 2009), and thus demonstrates a social cohesion among the students.Regardingorthographical/morphological economisation processeslike clipping, which we referto asreduced forms, we see evidence thatstudents are standardising the reduced formsthey use(Žegarac 1998).AsWenger (1998) argues, communities of practice involve a “sharedrepertoire”, and we argue thatreduced forms are part of thisrepertoire. Usersin onlinecommunities of practice use both ellipsis and reduced formsto create/maintain this community.As a result, they are also exhibiting social autonomy, a prerequisite for learner autonomy(Benson 2001).