Social Media and Changing Trends in Everyday Languages

Abstract

The emergence of the internet along with the consequential array of social media networks have, undoubtedly, resulted in an exponential increase in new types of language: blogs, tweets, Facebook posts and LinkedIn profiles are just a few to mention. There’s no denying that social media has had a drastic impact on the sheer volume of people we are now able to communicate with, it’s also had an impact on the frequency with which we are able to communicate with them. This has led us being exposed to a myriad of different personalities, perspectives, and approaches when we use social media to communicate. People who use the same social network build their own community with common interests, activities, and topics for discussions. With its global reach social media has also resulted in faster communication. The need for speed and easy understanding has thus altered the common used words and phrases. Some of the more popular social media sites limit the number of characters one can use in a post. Twitter, limits the “Tweet” to 280characters, thus pushing its users to become more adept at saying what they want or need to say with fewer words resulting new trending terms. It has even introduced new terms in English. This paper tries to highlight the changes in language and communication pattern with the introduction of social media in everyday life. The acceptances as well as the impact of the new vocabulary are also the areas where this paper has tried to focus. For this purpose, the main objective of this paper is to understand the changes introduced in English Language with the advent of social media, to analyse the acceptance of the new words in modern vocabulary as well as to analyse the impact that social media has brought in our everyday terms.