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(PDF) Media and Language Change: Introduction

   

Added on  2021-04-17

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Running head: SOCIAL MEDIA CHANGING LANGUAGEEnglish in MediaName of the Student:Name of the University:Author’s Note:

2SOCIAL MEDIA CHANGING LANGUAGEIn the modern day scenario, social media has become one of the most important aspectsof the life of mankind. However, the situation was very different even before a span of 10 to 15years. Neither the usage of social media nor the usage of sites like facebook, twitter, Instagramor any other such sites was needed. However slowly and gradually there underwent manychanges and now people cannot even imagine their lives without using the social mediaplatforms. Several new words have cropped up due to the usage of the social media and theinternet (Tuten & Solomon, 2017). These words have become very much a part of the day to dayconversation. Some of such words are like unfriend, selfie, groupie, LOL. The list is howevernever-ending. So, these new words have become an inseparable part of our communicationsystem. Earlier the word friend meant a noun or a common noun. However, with the advent andpopularity of social media, the term friend now is used as a verb. It signifies an action. Itbasically means to add someone as a friend on facebook or any other such media. So it can besaid that the social media is changing the language in many ways. The language has undergone so many different changes over the years with the arrival ofthe social media. The new words that have come up in the language due to the usage of the socialmedia are actually the short forms or the abbreviated forms like LOL. The full form of this LOLis laughing out loud which actually tries to express an emotion and a feeling. It helps in makingthe communication easier and much easily understandable (Kulkarni, Perozzi & Skiena, 2016,May).. This really helps people to share their happiness and their pleasure in the easiest waypossible. It can so happen that a joke was cracked at a college canteen between a group of fourfriends and two were missing. So, this joke or the fun out of the joke, can be shared with theremaining two friends through a message (via non verbal communication) by writing the jokeand then adding LOL with it. Thus, this helps in spreading the expression of joy and happiness

3SOCIAL MEDIA CHANGING LANGUAGEwith those people that are far away (Seargeant & Tagg, 2014). The definitions have also beenchanged a lot. In the modern times, the word bird and that of tweet goes hand in hand. Unlessthe word bird is mentioned along with tweet or twittering, all the people in general and the socialmedia users in particular, will think that the conversation is being done about twitter. Oftenthese code words are useful for the users to carry on the conversation in a very short, quick andan easy manner. Often the sender of the communication is in a hurry with some work and needsto send an urgent message, so instead of writing down the entire message he can easily make useof hashtags and just write the code words to make it understandable for the receiver. Emoji havealso helped in making the communication much easier. Though the thoughts can be explainedthrough writing, but in order to explain the feelings of happiness or sadness associated with it,the emojis help a lot. The language barrier has also been tried to be dealt with(Androutsopoulos, 2015). One of the most important tool through which the language barriershave been tried to be reduced is the AI chatbots. They are gaining wide-scale popularity onmedia. It is also said that these chatbots can be used for teaching language. Facebook is notmerely a social media platform but it has the built-in motif of bringing the people together byreducing the obstructions in the language. It mainly aims at bringing all the people together whoare belonging from the different cultural and linguistic backgrounds. However there can be astrong argument put forward by many others that the usage of social media has not really beensuccessful in making the language barriers blurred. This is because the usage of the social mediaacross different places is different. Different cultures make use of the social media in manydifferent ways (Pavalanathan & Eisenstein, 2015). Many people who are still followers of the oldtraditional methods of texting may be of the opinion that these shorthands are really veryannoying and are unclear. They cannot really explain the meaning of the statements being made.

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