You gotta problem?

They aren't alternate spellings, though; nobody actually writes out "I wanna go to the store" unless they're 6 years old. "Wanna" is a spoken form only.

Only lately do you see people writing out these things, and it's because so much of our writing now goes into replicating informal, casual speech-emails between friends, IMs, etc. It's writing to replicate speech; in the past you'd probably only find those forms in stories or something trying to capture actual spoken language between people.

Anyway, I think this is a non-issue when it comes to language. The only people who make an issue of it are ridiculously uptight weirdos who also hate that damned hipper-hopper music and think all music went downhill after Mozart.

<<They aren't alternate spellings, though; nobody actually writes out "I wanna go to the store" unless they're 6 years old.>>

Not true. I write "wanna" for "want to" in informal writing. "wanna" and "want to" actually sound different and are not alternative spellings. "wanna" and "want a" sound the same however.

Writing

"I wanna slice of pizza" for "I want a slice of pizza"

or

"You gotta problem?" for "You got a problem?" are as pointless as the following:

"I senna letter" for "I sent a letter"

"I hadda nightmare" for "I had a nightmare"

As well, they sound exactly the same, and therefore don't convey any unexpected phonetic meaning.

Unexpected phonetic meaning? What on earth are you talking about? You seem to have no understanding of language whatsoever, aside from a few glossary words you culled from a Linguistics 101 textbook you bought off Amazon Marketplace. Using the written form "wanna" instead of "want to" would make a sentence more informal and more like spoken speech; there's a time and a place to use it.

Language is a tool, not some sacred text. I take it you weren't an English or Linguistics major in school.

I just read your post again, Rick. You must not be a native speaker of English if you don't understand this.

Speak quickly and say "wanna go to the store" and "want to go to the store" - enunciating both T sounds in "want to" gives the sentence a stoccata-like effect whereas using "wanna" allows the sentence to flow more quickly. This relates to American English, but British English also has the same phenomenon in different forms. All languages have phenomena like this, so I take it you were raised in a cave. These things develop naturally among speakers.

<<Unexpected phonetic meaning? What on earth are you talking about? You seem to have no understanding of language whatsoever, aside from a few glossary words you culled from a Linguistics 101 textbook you bought off Amazon Marketplace. Using the written form "wanna" instead of "want to" would make a sentence more informal and more like spoken speech; there's a time and a place to use it.>>

You're obviously not reading what I've actually written. How can you tell me what I know about language when you can't even read what I've actually written?

I'm not talking about "wanna" for "want to", but rather "wanna" for "want a".

what about Lemme go?
Can you make T silent by writing it Let me go?