Language Change Presentation Summary

The Effect of Social Media Language Change 

Social media has helped us to develop a whole new range of ways to communicate including:

         •Acronyms such as ‘LOL’

         •Abbreviations such as ‘cus’ instead of ‘because’
•Neologisms (new words) such as ‘selfie’ which is a newly coined word or expression
•So people can get their point across quicker
•So that people can use emoticons and hash tags in their tweets
•Shorter tweets are also much more eye catching 

On some social media sites such as twitter you are restricted to only 140 characters therefore you have to adapt your language to communicate. This provokes people to using emoticons to express emotions, acronyms and abbreviations to shorten words as well as the hash tag (#) to categorize their tweets.

Such changes in language like hash tags are used in our everyday language, you can also find them all over popular culture such as cards, t-shirts and on TV.

Due to twitter users being limited to the amount of characters they can use they don’t type the way they would speak. This is for a variety of reasons:

1. People get their point across quicker 
2. So that people can use emoticons and hash tags in their tweets 
3. Shorter tweets are also much more eye catching

Lots of people assume that social media has dumbed down the English language, abbreviating words and changed meanings. However, there are also ways in which social media is strengthening the English language.

         •Social media can in fact help students to boost their creativity and become more aware of misspellings and poor grammar.

       •It also allows for language to be developed and updated to modern day

       •Social media language helps to save lots of time when wanting to talk to friends etc.

 

However, some spelling and grammar has deteriorated because of clippings and abbreviations being used so often on social media.