The impact of social media and the internet is phenomenal. Social media and networking have had a great impact on various spheres of life, including the language and mode of communication today. Social media is changing the language. The language used in social media is more malleable than formal, and it has a combination of informal and personal communication. This has made the language more susceptible to change
The effects of social media on language range from the introduction of new words, bringing in of new meaning to old words as well as changes in the way we communicate.
New ways of communication
The interactions and collaborations in the social networking setups have given rise to new verb phrase acronyms and abbreviations. For example acronyms such as “LOL” meaning” laughing out loud”, TTYL – talk to you later; Some have incorporated numbers between letters to shorten words, for instance “l8r” to mean later, “b4” to mean before. These acronyms and abbreviations have come in handy to minimize inconvenience of typing using tiny keys on the phones.
Moreover, it has helped to minimize the use of communication space, when the space is limited, for example on twitter where characters are limited then it becomes easier to fully communicate using such acronyms and abbreviations.
Emoticons such as “J” and other elements such as the #hashtag symbol, form a strong and useful element of non- verbal communications. They convey strong emotions which could rather be put across by lengthy explanations.
New meaning to words
The day to day use of Social media has seen bringing in of new meanings to old words. For example through face book, there is a complete meaning to the words like, “friend” , “wall”, “page” and profile. “Friend” means to add person on face book, “Add” means sending an invitation to a person on face book to be your friend, whereas “Likes” refers to the measure of the extent of popularity.
Troll … is a bill on social media causing a fuss without care
Increase in volume of communication
Social media has made it possible to have numerous and voluminous communications in a single day. It has brought in a great change in the way we communicate. It has necessitated people to share more personal information as it has made people to feel closer and the communications have become more open and informal. In addition the brevity of the language used on social media has made it possible to reach a large audience or group of people at a short time.
It has increased the number of communications in a day. This is because of the speed at which communication is passed across is so fast, and the brevity involved. Thus the volume of communication has increased (Schwartz et al., 2013.
Social interaction
Social media has also made it possible to access other people and keep in touch with friends and relatives irrespective of the distance. It has made it easier to interact with people, keeping tabs on each other even from a far (Durant, Alan, and Marina, 2009).
New words in English
The influence of social media cannot be underestimated. It has impacted on English language as it has influence d the incorporations of words from social media into the dictionary. Many internet words have made it into the oxford dictionary, for example “tweet” which means a post made on social network service twitter. Other new words which have been accepted include “googled,” “twitted,” and “friended.”
Social media has also led to the misuse of English grammar and incorrect abbreviated words such as changing “you’re” to “your” or instead of tomorrow to 2mor” or “message” to “msg”,
Social media has also influenced the way we use language in our speech. New words from the social media such as “Hashtag,” “Photobomb,” “Emoji” are now widely accepted in normal speech and communication has been incorporated in English.
Language correction
Social media benefits the learning of English as a language. It increases awareness of grammatical and spelling mistakes that people make as the mistakes will be out rightly pointed out by other users after posting.
Broke language barrier
Many people from different countries of dialects or languages would want to communicate on social media. Most of the content on the internet is in English. This has made everyone to try to use English language. Thus they come up with variant forms of the English language. But still it is acceptable as communication takes place (Kaplan et al., 2010)
Some social media services have incorporated translations features on their sites such that people are able to get translation of anything said in a different language. This has made communication more possible and convenient breaking the language barriers
Social media has transformed the way the Language is used and looked at. Social media is here to stay and has a tremendous effect on the way language is used. It is important that everyone keep up with the pace of technology as well as with the changes that come up through social media. Language is dynamic and keeps growing and therefore keeping an open mind on its changing aspects as new words and meaning will be beneficial in the long run.
Works Cited
Durant, Alan, and Marina Lambrou. Language and media: A resource book for students. Routledge, 2009.
Kaplan, Andreas M., and Michael Haenlein. "Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of Social Media." Business horizons 53.1 (2010): 59-68.
Schwartz, H. Andrew, et al. "Personality, gender, and age in the language of social media: The open-vocabulary approach." PloS one 8.9 (2013): e73791.
Schwartz, H. Andrew, et al. "Toward Personality Insights from Language Exploration in Social Media." AAAI Spring Symposium: Analyzing Microtext. 2013.
