FYI – Just posted a review to Txtng: The Gr8 Db8 by David Crystal, the author of several linguistics books written for the non-specialist audience, fills in this gap for the texting (aka SMS) quite nicely on my Linguist in the Wild blog.
Although it’s technically a “linguistics” book, most of the content focused on the sociology of texting both here and outside the U.S. And yes, there are some cool non-English texting abbreviations mentioned.