Analysis of the Language of New Social Media
Introduction
Recent technological advancements in computers, phones, and internet based communications have become an integral part of people’s lives. Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn have attracted million of English-speaking users who communicate and connect via the sites on a regular basis. The use of the internet communication technologies has undoubtedly shaped the way people communicate. Users share their thoughts and photos, organize their social lives, or at the very least have their lives significantly influenced through some form of internet-based interaction. This has had a huge effect not only on the physical interaction but on how people speak and write English on the social networking sites (Perez-Sabater, 2012). The meanings of known words have shifted and the totally new words have been coined causing the English vocabulary to expand to accommodate the new meanings and words. The differences between social media text and other forms of written language exist in multiple linguistic levels such as morphology, semantics, and phonology, making it a subject of increasing interest to linguists.
Morphology is a branch of linguistics that deals with the study of patterns of word-formation across a given language. Morphology attempts to elaborate the rules reflective of the knowledge of the people speaking the language and allows the deduction of the properties of one lexeme from another. Word-formation in social media is a process involving the use of existing language to create new lexical terms. In English, there are several processes involved in the lexical creation of social media terms.
Derivation
Derivation is the most common type of word-formation process in English and involves the addition of small bits of English language known as affixes to existing words to create new words. There are only three types of affixes all of which are not normally given separate listings in the English dictionary. Prefixes are added to the beginning of words, suffixes at the end of words, and infixes are incorporated inside words. An example new social media terms created through this process include retweet where the prefix “re” is added to tweet and lurker where the suffix “er” is added to the word lurk. Use of infixes is not common in the English language although some social media users have found a way to use in certain expression to show infuriation like in “Hallebloodylujah (Akunna, 2012).”
Compounding
Compounding involves the joining of two separate words to create a single word. Compound words can be spelled with spaces, dashes, or simply joined with nothing in between the individual words. Examples of such words include civic media that is a combination of civic and media, ego-surfing that is a combination of ego and surf, and hashtag that is a combination of hash and tag.
Conversion
Conversion involves a change in the category of a word without any change in the word itself. Nouns could be used as verbs and verbs used as nouns. In most cases, conversion completely changes the meaning of a word making it particularly productive in social media language with new uses occurring frequently. Examples include Google that is sometimes used as a verb to mean search on the internet and friend that is used as a verb to mean befriending someone on Facebook.
Coinage
This is one of the least used word-formation processes in the English language. Coinage is the invention of a totally new term meant to fit a specific purpose. Most coinages are nonce terms that do not become anything more than that. However, new words that survive after their first coinage tend to become normal words and are incorporated into everyday language. An example is selfie that is a picture taken by a person with arms visibly holding a camera with the intention of uploading on a social media website.
Blending
Blending is also a common process of forming words that is very similar to compounding. However, in blending only the beginning of a certain word is added to another word. Blends have become very common in the past decade and most of the blended words are cute and amusing (Akunna, 2012). Examples include blog that is a blend of web and log and lifecasting that is a blend of life and broadcasting.
Abbreviating
Some words used in social media networks are formed from initial letters of a set of other words. The words are useful in social media because they help speed up the amount of time taken in typing conversations and also add useful elements of non-verbal communication. Examples of such words include LOL (laugh out loud) and SMH (Shaking my head).
Semantic Analysis
In linguistics, semantics is generally described as the study of meaning. There are three types of semantics but of concern to this topic is lexical semantics that is the meaning of words in relation to the vocabulary of a language. Under lexical semantics, there is a category known as neologisms that are new words created from English word-formation rules or a new sense of a word in the early phases of their life cycles (Baldwin, 2014).
There are two ways in which neologism may occur. The first is expansion where the meaning the meaning of a word is extended by giving it new meaning and second is metaphor where a word or expression is used to refer to something other than what it was originally intended for to show resemblance between two things. Thus it can be safe to say that there are types of neologisms; completely new words, totally new meaning of an old word, and a new meaning of an existing word. Social media neologisms typically comprise of the first and last classes of neologisms. The first class includes those terms that were not existent before a certain period such as blogging that means writing regular posts on a website and egghead that refers to a person who is conservative in the use of social networks. The last class contains terms that have added one or more new meanings to existing words without the losing significance of the old meanings. This class includes such words as friend that is a person who social network user interact with daily and follow that means tracking a particular person’s activities on social media sites.
Phonological Analysis
Phonology is the study of the spoken aspect of a language. The most common form of phonological variation in social media text is consonant cluster reduction. Many English-speaking social media users have found ways to incorporate new orthographic transcriptions to capture the sounds of the language in the dialects they speak (Eisenstein, 2013). An example is deleting t in words like just and left, which is a common property in English spoken by African Americans. Deleting of h from words like with is characteristic of the stopping of the interdental fricative that is common in New York English. Dropping of g from words like going and doing is normal in informal speech among many English-speaking people in different parts of the world. This practice is associated with the coronal nasal replacing the velar nasal.
The frequency of the consonant cluster reduction depends on the morphology of the word it appears in and the phonology of preceding and subsequent segments. It is very rare to find consonant cluster reduction on social media when the subsequent phonological segment starts with a vowel while deletion is likely to take place when it is followed by a consonant. For example, the t in left in the phrase “I left the house” can be dropped but dropping it in the phrase “I left a tip” is inhibited.
Consonant cluster reduction is important in social media language where sometimes the need to include a large quantity of information in small character limits sometimes arises. In Twitter, users are only allowed to tweet texts that are no more than 140 characters (Balahur, 2013). Users of social media networks also use emoticons that are expressions of emotions using punctuation signs to reduce the number of characters used.
Conclusion
Advancements in technology have enabled millions of people all over the world to communicate through social media networks. How people speak and write English on the networks is different from other forms of written language. New words formed from existing words have been created using various processes for use in social media sites. The most common processes used in the formation of the new words are derivation and blending. Social media networks have also created new words that have never existed before to explain new phenomena. In other cases, the words used in social media have added new meanings to already existent words. Social media users have also found ways to reduce the number of characters in their language by deleting some consonants and use punctuation marks to express their emotions. They use these methods as means of including large quantity of information in limited character spaces.
References
Akunna, O. (2012). Social Media Neologisms. Lagos, Nigeria: University of Lagos.
Balahur, A. (2013). Sentiment analysis in social media texts. Retrieved from http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W/W13/W13-1617.pdf
Baldwin, T. (2014). Semantic analysis of social media. Retrieved from http://people.eng.unimelb.edu.au/tbaldwin/pubs/starsem2014.pdf
Eisenstein, J. (2013). Phonological Factors in Social Media Writing. Proceedings of the workshop on language analysis in social media
Pérez-Sabater, C. (2012). The linguistics of social networking: A study of writing conventions on Facebook. Retrieved from http://www.linguistik-online.com/56_12/perez-sabater.pdf
