English in Media: An Analysis of Social Media's Impact on Language

This essay explores the significant impact of social media on the English language. It examines the emergence of new vocabulary, such as "unfriend" and "selfie," and the adoption of abbreviations like "LOL." The essay highlights how social media has altered the traditional use of language, with words like "friend" transforming into verbs and the widespread use of emojis to convey emotions. It also discusses the role of AI chatbots in breaking down language barriers and facilitating communication across different cultures. While acknowledging criticisms of shorthand and potential for misinterpretation, the essay concludes that social media has fundamentally changed how people communicate, emphasizing the need to adapt to these linguistic shifts for effective communication. The references include various academic sources that support the arguments made in the essay.

Running head: SOCIAL MEDIA CHANGING LANGUAGE
English in Media
Name of the Student:
Name of the University:
Author’s Note:

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In the modern day scenario, social media has become one of the most important aspects
of the life of mankind. However, the situation was very different even before a span of 10 to 15
years. Neither the usage of social media nor the usage of sites like facebook, twitter, Instagram
or any other such sites was needed. However slowly and gradually there underwent many
changes and now people cannot even imagine their lives without using the social media
platforms. Several new words have cropped up due to the usage of the social media and the
internet (Tuten & Solomon, 2017). These words have become very much a part of the day to day
conversation. Some of such words are like unfriend, selfie, groupie, LOL. The list is however
never-ending. So, these new words have become an inseparable part of our communication
system. Earlier the word friend meant a noun or a common noun. However, with the advent and
popularity of social media, the term friend now is used as a verb. It signifies an action. It
basically means to add someone as a friend on facebook or any other such media. So it can be
said 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 of
the social media. The new words that have come up in the language due to the usage of the social
media are actually the short forms or the abbreviated forms like LOL. The full form of this LOL
is laughing out loud which actually tries to express an emotion and a feeling. It helps in making
the 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 way
possible. It can so happen that a joke was cracked at a college canteen between a group of four
friends and two were missing. So, this joke or the fun out of the joke, can be shared with the
remaining two friends through a message (via non verbal communication) by writing the joke
and then adding LOL with it. Thus, this helps in spreading the expression of joy and happiness

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with those people that are far away (Seargeant & Tagg, 2014). The definitions have also been
changed a lot. In the modern times, the word bird and that of tweet goes hand in hand. Unless
the word bird is mentioned along with tweet or twittering, all the people in general and the social
media users in particular, will think that the conversation is being done about twitter. Often
these code words are useful for the users to carry on the conversation in a very short, quick and
an easy manner. Often the sender of the communication is in a hurry with some work and needs
to send an urgent message, so instead of writing down the entire message he can easily make use
of hashtags and just write the code words to make it understandable for the receiver. Emoji have
also helped in making the communication much easier. Though the thoughts can be explained
through 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 barriers
have been tried to be reduced is the AI chatbots. They are gaining wide-scale popularity on
media. It is also said that these chatbots can be used for teaching language. Facebook is not
merely a social media platform but it has the built-in motif of bringing the people together by
reducing the obstructions in the language. It mainly aims at bringing all the people together who
are belonging from the different cultural and linguistic backgrounds. However there can be a
strong argument put forward by many others that the usage of social media has not really been
successful in making the language barriers blurred. This is because the usage of the social media
across different places is different. Different cultures make use of the social media in many
different ways (Pavalanathan & Eisenstein, 2015). Many people who are still followers of the old
traditional methods of texting may be of the opinion that these shorthands are really very
annoying and are unclear. They cannot really explain the meaning of the statements being made.

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However, this fact cannot be denied that the times are rapidly changing and life has become too
fast in this age. So, people do not always have time to type big and lengthy messages and are
firm believers in using the shorthands. The word selfie has taken the entire internet by storm and
this word has also been named as the word of the year by the Oxford English Dictionary in the
year 2013. After a span of two years the emoji that signifies the tears of joy was named as the
word of the year. So, these changes that have been brought in the language are helping people to
express their feelings of joy, happiness, tears, anger, sadness, fun and many other such emotions
to their friends and relatives living far from them. However efforts are to be made so that people
belonging to many different cultures and linguistic backgrounds are able to connect with these
short hands and the emojis (Pringle, 2018). The AI chat boxes must be properly developed so
that people who have problems in communicating can easily overcome it.
Thus, it can be concluded that the modern usage of the social media has brought many
different changes in the language (Barbieri et al., 2016). However, these linguistic differences or
the changes are being accepted by some and are being resented by others. So, efforts are to be
made that these changes can be used in a useful manner so that it can benefit all the people as a
whole. This also reminds people that change is constant and the best policy is to accept the
change and flow along with it so that it can be utilized for the good.

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References
Androutsopoulos, J. (2015). Networked multilingualism: Some language practices on Facebook
and their implications. International Journal of Bilingualism, 19(2), 185-205.
Barbieri, F., Kruszewski, G., Ronzano, F., & Saggion, H. (2016, October). How cosmopolitan
are emojis?: Exploring emojis usage and meaning over different languages with
distributional semantics. In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM on Multimedia
Conference (pp. 531-535). ACM.
Fromkin, V., Rodman, R., & Hyams, N. (2018). An introduction to the language. Cengage
Learning.
Fuchs, C. (2017). Social media: A critical introduction. Sage.
Kulkarni, V., Perozzi, B., & Skiena, S. (2016, May). Freshman or Fresher? Quantifying the
Geographic Variation of Language in Online Social Media. In ICWSM (pp. 615-618).
Miller, D., Costa, E., Haynes, N., McDonald, T., Nicolescu, R., Sinanan, J., ... & Wang, X.
(2016). How the world changed social media (p. 286). UCL press.
Pavalanathan, U., & Eisenstein, J. (2015). Emoticons vs. emojis on Twitter: A causal inference
approach. arXiv preprint arXiv:1510.08480.
Pringle, R. (2018). Emojis are everywhere and they're changing how we
communicate. Technology & Science.
Sergeant, P., & Tagg, C. (Eds.). (2014). The language of social media: Identity and community
on the internet. Springer.

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Tuten, T. L., & Solomon, M. R. (2017). Social media marketing. Sage.