Social Media and the English Language
We cannot get away from the fact that social media has changed our interaction with people. Now, we are able to share our thoughts, memories and our social events without having to actually converse with an actual person face to face or over the telephone. So, does this mean that the way we talk and write has changed also?
Social media now allows us to ‘meet’ with a wider variety of people, whereas before, we only met up with people in our own social circle. This is a good thing, because it allows us to re-engage with people who we have not seen for a long time, in some instances, many years. Also, it allows us to meet new people.
Social media has allowed communication to become much faster between people as Facebook can spread the word between all the people you have a connection with. This means you only have to send the message once. When using Twitter, you are only allowed a limited amount of words which makes you write what you want to say in a brief way rather than making it long winded.
Acronyms such as LOL or TTFN are widely used as replacements for the actual words to enable a person who might be in a hurry to be somewhere else, to communicate without the need to write whole sentences.
Emoticons (the little yellow face which has different expressions), is used to communicate how the person sending the message is feeling, without using words. Many people would say that this is a lazy way of relaying a message, but social media is there for quick to the point messages, not long drawn out essays which may bore the person reading the message.
Language is ever changing and social media is having an impact on the way we communicate daily.
Lots of words which have come from social media and the internet as a whole are now being entered into the English Dictionary. Words such as ‘Troll’ and ‘Buzzword’.
Google, which is a brand name, is also used in every day conversation. A person may want to find something on the internet, so they ‘Google’ it. Sending quick messages via social media is now called ‘Tweeting’, whereas before, it was known as sharing.
These are just a few examples of the way that social media has changed the way we use the written word.
The way we communicate has changed so much over the last ten years, I wonder what will happen with communication in the next ten years?
(Image: Entrepreneur.com)
