… because one SMS (text message) can contain 160 characters in Karelian and only 70 characters in Russian. (the reason being that Karelian is written in latin characters and Russian is written in cyrillic characters).

I spotted the abovementioned comment from a newspaper and the opinion was made by an older woman, whose native language is Karelian. The news article can be found News article about Karelian language.

The Karelian language (karjala, karjal or kariela) is closely related to the Finnish dialects spoken in eastern Finland and some Finnish linguists even classified Karelian as a dialect of Finnish. The language is spoken in Karelia, the part of Russia that lies closest to the Finnish border.

The language is in danger of dying; many children (not all) learn the language but most if not all become more fluent in Russian and largely stop using the language later in life. The reason is that Russian is de facto language in the communities of Karelia, yet the writing of SMS:s seem to be the exception in this.