Social Media Spawns Linguistic Hybrid
Social
Media Redefines English Language
On any given day, Oxford Street is bustling with
hordes of people of all ages, twiddling their thumbs away on their Smartphones.
With a whopping 565 million users worldwide, we live in an era where the
internet is a crucial and evident part of our lives. This revolution has given voice
to many and platforms for new genres to evolve. The rapid growth of social
media is seemingly changing English language as we know it. Or worse, as some
would say, destroying it.
I
‘Ship’ Language and Social Media
The computer age has invaded homes, businesses and
institutions, undoubtedly transforming the way we think and communicate. This
change has transformed and redefined private and social spaces, whilst reshaping language. The media landscape in the 20th century
was simpler, in the sense that there was a hierarchy. It was the professionals
who broadcasted to the masses, the language being distilled through editing to
create the correct version. The whole process between the professionals and
masses was receptive. But now this hierarchy has collapsed, former audiences
are now full participants and producers, creating a complex web of
communication, connecting people together in a matter of seconds. Allowing them
to access the varieties of each other’s ‘Englishes’ from all around the world,
as linguist David Crystal puts it.
Cyberspace has provided a platform that is
conductive to large contact, community building and, language change and shift.
It has opened venues for people to redefine the way they communicate, how they
use language and how they express their identities. People now have access to
multi-modal language, where spoken idiosyncrasies can be expressed through
writing on the internet. This has compelled us to condense complex ideas and
thoughts into mere symbols, letters and numbers. The influence of it on
language has sprouted things like:
‘asdfghjk’
– typing straight across the keyboard, used when there are too many emotions to
write anything coherent.
‘Feels’
– clipping
of ‘feelings’, used to express a wave of emotions that
cannot be adequately expressed, ‘Ugh, this new show is giving me so many
feels.’
‘ROFL’ - Rolling On the
Floor Laughing, used to emphasise the
hilarity of a situation.
‘Ship’
– the suffix of the noun ‘relationship’ is used. It is the act of pairing any two
people or characters together. It is used both as a noun ‘I see a ’ship
developing between Justin and Selena’ or as a verb ‘I ship Justin and Selena’.
These may appear alien to non-social media users but
they are in fact the daily working code of the world of social networking.
Twitter spearheaded English, with its 140 character
limit, driving the world to convey something meaningful in 20-30 words. It
pushes us to get to the essence of what we are trying to say, making us communicate
in bite-size quotes, increasing the invention of never-ending supplies of
abbreviations and acronyms.
This has led The Guardian to evolve a new genre
called the ‘Twitter fiction’, where top writers try their hand at writing a
story with the 140 character limit.
Who says you need full sentences and paragraphs to
make an impact or drive people to action?
The English language, as we know it is at a turning
point. The development is accelerating at an unprecedented rate and dictionary
publishers are scrambling to strike the right balance between relevancy and
credibility.
Social media is at the centre of this struggle, a
driving force in the transformation of language and expansion of our lexicon,
reducing the time it takes for new terms to spread. Encouraging participation
by celebrities, bloggers and the public makes the selection process more
diverse. There are countless examples of these including ‘YOLO’ (You Only Live Once’), an acronym that is popularised in 2011
after being featured in the hip hop ‘The Motto’ by rapper Drake.
Progress
or Decay?
There is a vast reservoir of attitudes towards these
language changes. In a whirlwind of abbreviations, clipped words and deviant
spelling, it seems that English is getting lost, as some say.
You have the Prescriptivists, the Knights of English
Language, horrified and appalled at such change that puts the linguistic
heritage in danger of decay. A language that has been crafted by great literary
masters is corrupted and is in dire need of saving. These knights armed with
chauvinism, claim that irresponsible use of computer mediated communications is
making English to become deficient and sloppy.
According linguist Jean Aitchison’s ‘infectious
disease’ model, this language change is seen as an infection that people seem
to have caught unwittingly.
John Humphrys argues
that people are now "vandals
who are doing to our language what Genghis Khan did to his neighbours 800 years
ago. They are destroying it:
pillaging our punctuation; savaging our sentences; raping our vocabulary. And
they must be stopped."
Linguist Jean Aitchison, parodies prescriptivism by
putting forward the crumbling castle view, which treats English as a beautiful,
pristine, ornate building that must be preserved. Any change is like the castle
eroding, letting it fall to ruin.
But how can we save something when it’s out of our
hands? The issue is that the language
has to have been at a ‘perfect’ state at some point, but standardisation never
fully set down ‘rules’ until 300 years ago. It’s a global language; therefore,
the varieties of Englishes are sprawling all over the world, which there is no
control over. And unlike the French, we don’t have an ‘Académie Anglais’ to
monitor English.
But linguist David Crystal isn’t too worried about
this. He argues that despite the doom-laden prophesies, these new forms will
not stay for long but will evolve out eventually. For Professor Crystal it’s
too early to fully evaluate the impact.
And then
there are the Descriptivists, the hippies of English language. They believe that
change is a natural occurrence and that language is organic and will change to
cater society’s needs. Language is an open system that will change as long as
it is alive. Let the chips fall where
they may, they say. If people understand each other, then who are we to judge
and say what’s wrong?
Some linguists are
thrilled with these changes, as there’s wide scope for research. A great way to
track language change and variation is Twitter. Jacob Eisentein and
his team in the Georgia Institute of Technology discovered that new words and
abbreviations of older ones are more likely to spread via social networking
site Twitter from US urban areas with large African-American populations. This
seems to be an attempt to construct their own identity and assent their individuality
by deviating from Standard English.
Holding
On....and Letting Go
The internet being fast paced and larger than life,
might lead English to both greater uniformity of usage and diversity of users.
The internet access will accelerate on-going changes in languages around the
world, as more people have access to this electronic variety of English. So it
could end up being the World Standard English that everyone uses.
The English Language is constantly changing to
accommodate technology and culture. Social media is a prominent feature of our
lives and its here to stay. There’s no escape. Therefore, reluctant as we might
be, Net speak will seep into our everyday language. There’s a fine line between
the holding on to the good Ol’ traditional English and accepting the new
rejuvenated form, but going forward, the two ends of the spectrum only seem to
be blurring.
Note!
Hey guys, just wanted to share this article I had written with you because it's interesting and thought you guys would find it interesting too! So let me know your thoughts on this.
Is social media REALLY changing the way people use English? Let me know on the comments below!
