  While users in the developed world can choose to adopt the technology that
suits their needs, the emergent users cannot afford this luxury, hence, they
adapt themselves to the technology that is readily available. When technology
is designed, such as the mobile-phone technology, it is an implicit assumption
that it would be adopted by the emergent users in due course. However, such
user groups have different needs, and they follow different usage patterns as
compared to users from the developed world. In this work, we target an emergent
user base, i.e., users from a university in Pakistan, and analyse their texting
behaviour on mobile phones. We see interesting results such as, the long-term
linguistic adaptation of users in the absence of reasonable Urdu keyboards, the
overt preference for communicating in Roman Urdu and the social forces related
to textual interaction. We also present two case studies on how a single
dataset can effectively help understand emergent users, improve usability of
some tasks, and also help users perform previously difficult tasks with ease.
