THE POSITIVE INFLUENCE OF THE LANGUAGE OF SOCIAL MEDIA ON THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

ABSTRACT

The boom in the use of social media in our time has no doubt brought a lot alteration in different language conventions. The early users of social media battled with space and time. Since social media language is in the borderline of speech and writing they created unusual acronyms and some other new words, like ‘u’, ur, ‘unfriend’ etc not only to communicate faster but also to maximize the limited space they have. Some linguists began to protest as these coinages were not only used within the circle of social media and  informal writing but began to get into the mainstream of the English language. They see it as a threat to their language.

This paper takes a different stand as it sees this trend as sign of language change. We know that people’s passion for their language has propelled them to constantly keep vigil to make sure it is protected. This has led to the creation of ‘Dos’ and ‘Don’ts’ which have continued to hinder the operations of the language. But  language change is so subtle that the users hardly realize when it occurs. This shows that they do not consciously bring this change. Though they are the drivers of this change, they do not know how it happens. Any language that finally ends up in the cage of

‘dos’ and ‘don’ts’ has fallen into the danger list and may be forgotten soon.

We should not lose sight of the fact that both the rigidity and the flexibility of a language are domiciled in the language community, and that calls to mind what Noam Chomsky calls langue. Language tilts towards death any time linguists, in the spirit of protecting their language, try to stop the language users from exploring their creativity in the language. While Chapter one is the general introductory overview, chapter two gives the conceptual account of Language Change and reviews the literature in this area till date. Being a linguistic study, chapter three presents the nature of the data involved in this study and shows how the data were collected and the method

and processes involved in their analysis. Chapter four presents the results and analyses them. The summary and the conclusions of the study are made in chapter five. From our findings it is evident that the language of social media is not a threat to the English language. It is, therefore, pertinent that linguists begin to see the language of social media as an agent of linguistic revolution.

CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION

1.1 BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY

Social media is the social interaction among people in which they create, share or exchange information and ideas in virtual communities and networks. In Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein’s definition, social media is ‘a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content’ (para 1)

Social Media is the future of communication, a countless array of internet-based tools and platforms that increase and enhance the sharing of information. This new form of media makes the transfer of text, photos, audio, video, and information in general increasingly fluid among internet users. Social media has relevance not only for regular internet users, but for business as well. Platforms like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Whatsapp have created online communities where people can share as much or as little personal information as they desire with other members. The result is an enormous amount of information that can be easily shared, searched, promoted, disputed, and created.

Social Bookmarking tools and news sites such as Digg, Delicious, reddit, and countless others make finding specific information, images, or websites increasingly simple by assigning or “tagging” individual sites with searchable key words.

Applications that have developed within and around these platforms, websites, and tools are endless in number and functionality, but all make online sharing and searching easier in some fashion, regardless of their niche. As nearly every type of business has an association in the non- digital world, so too does the internet offer an endless number of niche to social communities

where members can gather around a common topic. Topics both – general and specific – now have living homes on the internet; anything from colon and digestive health to security and compliance can and do have active social media communities (para1)

Therefore, the ascendency of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has made the world a global village, and social media has contributed immensely in enhancing the standard of world communication. Jan H. Kietzmann et al present a framework that defines social  media  by  using  seven  functional  building  blocks:  identity,  conversations,  sharing, presence, relationships, reputation, and groups.

•           Identity: This block represents the extent to which users reveal their identities in a social media setting. This can include disclosing information such as name, age, gender, profession, location, and also information that portrays users in certain ways.

•           Conversations: This block represents the extent to which users communicate with other users  in  a  social  media  setting.  Many social  media  sites  are  designed primarily to facilitate conversations among individuals and groups. These conversations happen for all sorts of reasons. People tweet, blog, et cetera to meet new like-minded people, to find true love, to build their self-esteem, or to be on the cutting edge of new ideas or trending topics. Yet others see social media as a way of making their message heard and positively impacting humanitarian causes, environmental problems, economic issues, or political debates.

•           Sharing:  This  block represents the  extent  to  which users  exchange,  distribute, and receive  content.  The  term ‘social’  often implies  that  exchanges between people are

crucial. In many cases, however, sociality is about the objects that mediate these ties between people – the reasons why they meet online and associate with each other.

•           Presence: This block represents the extent to which users can know if other users are accessible. It includes knowing where others are, in the virtual world and/or in the real world, and whether they are available.

•           Relationships: This block represents the extent to which users can be related to other users. Two or more users have some form of association that leads them to converse, share objects of sociality, meet up, or simply just list each other as a friend or fan.

•           Reputation: This block represents the extent to which users can identify the standing of others, including themselves, in a social media setting. Reputation can have different meanings on social media platforms. In most cases, reputation is a matter of trust, but because information technologies are not yet good at determining such highly qualitative criteria. Social media sites rely on ‘mechanical turks’: tools that automatically aggregate user-generated information to determine trustworthiness.

•           Groups: This block represents the extent to which users can form communities and sub- communities. The more ‘social’ a network becomes, the bigger the group of friends, followers, etc.

In all, the English language is one of the media through which all these are transmitted. The English language is one of the most favoured languages in internet exploration. One of the reasons the  language has enjoyed this acceptability,  especially in Nigeria,  is that there are multiple ethnic groups. The language has been able to bring to an end the problem of inter-tribal communication. The English language is no longer seen as a sole property of the English people,

but as a global language. Sam Onuigbo and Joy Eyisi (29) describe the language as an important centrifugal force that pulls divergent chords towards a central point in spite of the diversity of the world today. Even though computer and lasers are tools for space age, English is the language of transmission. It has become a lingua franca, a global language regularly used and understood by many nations for whom English is not a first language.

The English language has also  enjoyed this acceptability because of its  malleability which has led to a number of varieties of the language. Language can be recreated by so many factors, few of such factors include cultural and social influences. The English Language of social  media  is  remarkably different  from the  Standard English  language  used  for  official purposes. It is a language recreated by social demands.   The language is characterized with abbreviations, slang and emoticons. The main purpose of using these is to use least number of characters needed to convey a comprehensible message. It is on this ground that people argue that social media has destroyed the English language. Their argument is also based on the excessive usage of what some see as undecipherable innitialism, abbreviations, emoticons.  John Humphery is one of the loud voices against the language of social media. He strongly believes that it is ‘wrecking our language’. Textese, as these signs and abbreviations are also called, and emoticons have been described by John as ‘irritating’. His argument is that ‘the sloppy habit gained while using textese will result in student’s growing ignorance of proper grammar and punctuation’ (para1). Others believe social media is not ruining language, but rather simply changing the ways which we use language to express ourselves. Their argument is that it is not written language and should not be compared with other written forms of language. It is rather what John McWhorter calls ‘finger speech’. He sees it as a form of spoken language which is looser, telegraphic and less reflective than written language.(para 7)

Whenever we talk of how the language of social media has changed our, our mind quickly goes to the negative influence. This research will try to oppose that notion. We will try to look at the social media as one of the numerous ways through which new words come into English. The English language is said to be highly cosmopolitan because of its wide borrowing nature. Besides the introduction of new words, old words change in their meanings, and the ways we use them. This is what keeps English alive, unlike some dead languages like Latin.

Languages change for a variety of reasons. Large-scale shifts often occur in response to social, economic and political pressures. History records many examples of language change fueled by invasions, colonization and  migration. Even without these kinds of influences, a language can change dramatically if enough users alter the way they speak it.

Frequently, different uses to which a language is put by the speakers influence language change. New technologies, industries, products and  experiences simply require new words. Plastic, cell phones and the Internet didn’t exist in Shakespeare’s time, for example. By using new and emerging terms, we all drive language change. But the unique way that individuals speak also fuels language change – no two individuals use a language in exactly the same way. The vocabulary and phrases people use depend on where they live, their age, education level, social status and other factors. Our idiolects give personal signature to our text and talk. Through our interactions, we pick up new words and sayings and integrate them into our speech. Teens and young adults, for example, often use different words and phrases from their parents. Some of them spread through the population and slowly change the language (Nicole Mahoney para 3)

Some of these words from social media are gradually forcing themselves into the English lexicon – words like unlike and defriend or unfriend have entered our lexicon as legitimate verbs.

Those who are trying to break into social media scene may find them frustrating. Opinions are divided on the issue of the influence of social media on the English Language. While many suggest that there is evidence of a negative impact of social media on the English language, this paper tries to see it as a potential avenue of getting new words into English. It may be necessary to remind us that new words enter English from every area of life where they represent and describe the changes and developments that take place from day to day. Word like chatroom was hitherto not an English word, but it is now recognized as an English word. The language of social media is also changing English in a number of ways and that should not be seen as a negative development.

On platforms like Twitter, where there are only 140 characters to communicate and categorize your message, it  is believed that abbreviations are often necessary. It  is equally believed that Facebook, Twitter and other interaction-based social media sites allow more loose language than other formal writing avenues which are strictly guided by normal writing conventions. When writing on social media, we are more succinct, trying to get to the point quicker and to operate within the creative constraint of 140 characters (on Twitter). We use textese or textspeaks which is characterized with some uncommon acronyms and abbreviations, like LOL (laugh out Loud), Ur (your), etc. They equally make use of emoticons. People may not frown at these as long as they are used within the confines of social media. It is not arguable that these may be deviant structures in formal writings, based on the grammatical rules we know. But we should not also  forget that some grammatically acceptable words were hitherto seen as ungrammatical. And that is what linguists call language change. One of the major attributes of any  living  language  is  dynamism.  A  language  starts dying  once  it  closes all  doors to  the ingenuity of its speakers, restricting them to its age-long norms. Language change is a linguistic

phenomenon that most users of any language are not comfortable with. The English language we speak today is remarkably different from the English language spoken centuries ago. And the language  continues to  change  as  long  as  the  linguistic  horizon of its  users does  not  stop widening.

One  of  the  criteria  lexicographers consider  in  getting  new  words  into  the  English language is the dominance of the words in the language community. Since we have over one billion users of social media, there is high tendency of the influx of large stock of words from social media to the English language.

Also worthy of note is the fact that most of these lexical items on the social media follow the convention of morphological processes. In the words we considered above, they are formed by a morphological process known as pre-fixation.

1.2 STATEMENT OF PROBLEM

One of the characteristics of a living language is that it changes, and this happens as the language struggles to keep up with everyday requirements of people’s linguistic demands. Any language which fails to change to meet these demands is termed an endangered language. So English changes because it is malleable, though this malleability does not in any way overrule linguistic conventions. It means that the language is flexible enough to accept words which may not have originated from English, but have stuck within the language community over time. These words could come from anywhere. Even fossilized errors at times later become acceptable usages in English.

It may not be right to adjudge the English of social media wrong as long as it is used within the confines of its world. As it has been argued to be a jargon created to avoid some bottlenecks inherent in writing, which is the reason John Mcwhorter called it ‘finger speech’ (para 7). Speech is much more informal than writing, and that aspect of informality is incorporated into this to aid fast and easy communication. They are adjudged erroneous when they are found in our formal writings.

This project wants to find out how the language of social media has influenced the English language in that some of these words from the social media which hitherto were termed ungrammatical are becoming acceptable as part of the  English lexicon.

1.3 RESEARCH QUESTIONS

The following questions guided the study:

1)  Is there any influence of social media on the way people write and speak the English language?

2)  Is this influence negative or positive?

The data for answering these research questions will be generated from:

a)  students’ essay scripts; and

b)  Facebook and Whatsapp pages among the speakers of the English Language.

1.4 PURPOSE OF STUDY

The purpose of this study is:

(1) to  identify  the  influence  of social  media  system  of communication on  the  English language;

(2) to identify the extent to  which social media language influences the English of the sampled population; and

(3) to reveal the influence on the English language.

1.5 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY

The language of social media has come as antidote to the bottlenecks involved in formal writing. Since the social media is a platform of sharing pieces of information which are largely informal, there comes a need to make the interaction faster and less time consuming. The need gave rise to textspeaks and emoticons which are basically what distinguishes the language of social media from the normal written English. Many researchers have viewed the influence of social media on the English language from negative perspective, but this paper tries to look at it as a potential source through which new words can come into English. This study, therefore, is significant in the following ways:

1.  It will reveal the way the language of social media has affected the use of the English

Language.

2.  It will reveal social media as a means of morphological process.

3.  It will help the users of the English language to know that language change is not a negative phenomenon; rather it shows that a language is alive.

1.6 SCOPE OF STUDY

This study is trying to investigate the influence of the social media system of communication on the English language. This research will focus on Facebook and Twitter, since we may not be able to cover all the aspects of social media because of its vast nature. Public Notices were used as sample to show how the language of social media is beginning to creep into the formal writings of the users of the English language.

1.7 THE DYNAMIC NATURE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

Though users of any language are not comfortable with language change, it remains one of the features of a living language. Such change, according to Tom McAuthur, may affect any parts of a Language (pronunciation, orthography, grammar, vocabulary), and is taking place all the time. It  may  be  abrupt  or gradual. During the  past  nine centuries,  English has undergone more dramatic changes than any other major European language. As a result, Old English or Anglo- Saxon is not accessible to the modern English speaker in the way that Medieval Icelandic is to the modern Icelander. McAuthur also opines that when people do notice change, their reactions are often negative (for example, the use of disinterested to mean uninterested), and conscious attempts are made to resist it. These are usually not successful in the long term. Deliberate attempts are sometimes made, however, by social pressure groups or by governments to change aspects of a language or its use which includes ENGLISH, FRENCH, GERMAN, GREEK, LATIN, and SANSKRIT.(1)

One may ask ‘why does language change?’ It  has been discovered that language is transformed progressively as it is transmitted from one generation to the next – the idea being

that as each generation must re-create the grammar from the input received from parents, older siblings and other members of the speech community, something gets altered. The grammar any new generation devises will  be  based on the output from speech generated by the  mature grammars of previous generations of native speakers; however, these grammars may differ due to ambiguities in the input that allow for different solutions, or due to some sort of skewing in the data received.

Another line of explanation lies in considering how the transmission of language is mediated by social forces. For one thing, children acquire language based on the input of many speakers, and these speakers may well have different linguistic systems based on their own different linguistic histories. It is well established in phonology that children whose parents have foreign accents acquire the variety of the language spoken by the native-speaker community around them rather than the  foreign accent  of their parents. This also  holds across dialect boundaries: the child growing up in America whose parents come from Nigeria will end up speaking  like  an  American.  The  implication  of  this  is  that  children  are  formulating  their linguistic systems over a period of years, and input from later in childhood (when they hear more from peers than from parents) has an important effect.

Words can change in various ways. A word can be replaced by another word (thus Latin caput ‘head’ was replaced in Old French by the slang usage of the word testa ‘cup’ to mean head. Testa eventually lost its slang connotation and became the normal word for ‘head’ in French (now la tete). Some words have been replaced because they may be homonymous with taboo words that people avoid: this is cited in a major textbook on historical linguistics as the reason that rooster has largely replaced cock in American English. Other words, of course, drop out of

languages subsequent to cultural change that renders their referents obsolete. This would apply, for example, to technologies that have been replaced

According to David Crystal there are six types of semantic change. They are discussed below.

      Extension: In Modern English, board, originally a plank of wood, had already come to be used for ‘table’ before it was again extended to refer to the people who sit around the table (as in ‘board of governors’), or the food that is served on the table (as in ‘bed and board’).

      Narrowing. Though most of us learn in school that in English animal includes all life forms that are not plants, we generally use it to refer to a much narrower range: the four- footed animals.

    Shift. Modern English silly derives from OE saelig, meaning ‘happy, blessed, blissful’.

    Figurative use. Very tall buildings are called skyscrapers.

      Amelioration. Old English cniht ‘servant’ became Modern English knight, which refers to a nobleman.

      Pejoration. A villain once simply meant ‘belonging to the villa’, and referred to people now usually called ‘peasants'(quoted in language change 4)

left in some high-frequency words like children, but even here, we can often observe young learners analogizing when they create forms like childs and sheeps.

McArthur also categorized the changes that occur in language into the following:

    Grammatical change

He stated that  major changes  in syntax and  morphology have  affected English over  many centuries to the extent that speakers of modern English are not able to understand Old English without training. The structure of Old English was more like Latin in that words had various inflectional endings to indicate their grammatical function. This situation has been much simplified:  for  example,  the  form of the  definite  article  ‘the’,  now  invariant,  once  varied according to  case,  number, and  gender, as  in  se  mona (the  moon:  masculine, nominative, singular), seo sunne (the sun: feminine, nominative, singular), and þæt tungol (the star: neuter, nominative,  singular).  Word order  in  Old  English was  more  flexible  because  grammatical relations were made clear by the endings: Se hund seah þone wifmann (The dog saw the woman) could also be expressed as þone wifmann seah se hund, because the inflected forms of the definite article makes it clear that ‘woman’ is the direct object in both cases. In Modern English, however, grammatical relations are indicated largely by word order, so that ‘The dog saw the woman’ and ‘The woman saw the dog’ (compare Old English Se wifman seah þone hund) meaning two different things. Modern English has also lost its system of classifying nouns into three grammatical genders, as still occurs in German.

    Lexical change

Such a change is caused by both internal and external factors. Internal change can mean the adaptation of both the meanings and forms of existing words and phrases through such factors as assimilation, elision, and reduction. External change includes the borrowing of words, which may  be  occasional  and  minimal.  All  such  acquisition  results  in  the  introduction  of  new vocabulary and sometimes new word structures and patterns of word-formation.

CONCLUSION

People often react negatively to change and regard it as due to ignorance, laziness, or sloppiness. This can be seen in McAurthur’s argument that the letters written to newspapers complaining that the contemporary uses of words like disinterested, hopefully, and regime are incorrect. The spread of language change is basically a social phenomenon, as can be seen from recent sociolinguistic studies, which have shown that changes associated with prestige groups often have a greater chance of being adopted than others.  Since social media has assumed a prestigious status in recent years, it becomes a potential source through which new words can come into English.

1.8 COMPUTER MEDIATED COMMUNICATION (CMC)

This is defined as any human communication that occurs through the use of two or more electronic devices. While the term has traditionally referred to those communication systems that occur via computer-meditated format (instant messaging, E-mail, Chatrooms, etc), it has also been applied to other forms of text-based interaction such as text messaging. Research on CMC focuses largely on social effect of different computer-supported communication technologies. Many recent studies involve internet-based social networking, supported by social software.(Wikipedia para1)

CMC AND THE ENGLISH LEXICON

When social media came newly, people regarded it as a network for special professionals, but over time it became a common place for everyone from all walks of life. Alex Brown observed

that the mass adoption and consumption of information in abbreviated form has changed the way people communicate now and forever. For this reason, the Collins Dictionary editors decided that it was time to invite the public to contribute to the word submission process. He further stated thus:

In   July,2012,   we   opened   up   CollinsDictionary.com   to   crowd   sourcing, encouraging  English  speakers  from  around  the  world  to  submit  words  they believe should be included in the dictionary. More than 1,500 suggestions were made in the first week at www.CollinsDictionary.com/whatsyourword, with many of the submitted words emerging from social media and technology, as well as pop culture (Para 2)

For the fact that the English language is evolving so quickly, it can be difficult to stay up to speed. Five years ago, if I asked you to “Follow me,” you would have asked, “Where?” Now it has a completely different meaning because of the rise of social media. Our assimilation into a culture of online lingo has changed the way we communicate, which needs to be recognized and recorded by an authority such as Collins and other dictionaries.

He admitted they have seen submissions such as tweeps, Tebowing, cray and yolo. These words have skyrocketed to popularity because of the number of users of these words in the social media. The prevalence of online networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn   has fueled the discussion and increased the speed of adoption. While some of the more trendy language will certainly fade, there are some words that will be in our conversations for a long time to come.

Facebook

Facebook is an online social networking service headquartered in Menlo Park, California. Its website was launched on February 4, 2004, by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow Harvard University students Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCllum, Dustin Moskvitz and Chris Hughes. The founders had initially limited the website’s membership to Harvard students, but later expanded it to colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy Leagu, and Standford University. It gradually added support  for  students at  various  other  universities and  later  to  high-school students. Since 2006, anyone who is at least 13 years old is allowed to become a registered user of the website, though the age requirement may be higher depending on applicable local laws. Its name comes from a colloquialism for the directory given to it by American universities students (Wikipedia n. pg.).

After registering to use the site, users can create a profile, add other users as “friends”, exchange messages, post status updates and photos, share videos and receive notifications when others update their profiles. Additionally, users may join common-interest user groups, organized by workplace, school or college, or other characteristics, and categorize their friends into lists such as “People from Work” or “Close Friends.” Facebook had over 1.44 billion monthly active users as of March 2015. Because of the large volume of data users submit to the service, Facebook has come under scrutiny for their privacy policies. Facebook, Inc. held its initial public offering in February 2012 and began selling stock to the public three months later, reaching an original peak market capitalization of $104 billion. As of February 2015 Facebook reached a market capitalization of $212 Billion’ (Wikipedia, no. pag.).

Twitter

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that has changed the way many people communicate. Twitter allows users to send “updates” (or “tweets”: text-based posts, up to

140 characters long) to Twitter website via short message service (e.g. on a cell phone), instant messaging, from their computer at home or work, or through a third-party application.

Some see this as a way to simply report their ‘status’ to friends, some use it to post interesting links, some use it as a savvy marketing tool and still there are countless ways to utilize this real time quick messaging application.

In twitter, one can search for other twitterers by using the search box or browse other Twitter users and choose to ‘follow’ their tweets if you wish (that’s all what Twitter is about – following others and getting others to follow you). You can make your tweets private or public and even send messages direct to other twitterers, as opposed to publicly posting yours.

If you’ve been hiding under a digital rock for the past few years, here’s the scoop on Twitter. Basically, you can use the service to post and receive messages to a network of contacts. Instead of sending a dozen e-mails or text messages, you send one message to your Twitter account, and the service distributes it to all your followers. Members use Twitter to organize impromptu gatherings (or even political protests), carry on group conversations or just send quick updates to let people know what’s going on.

Twitter’s history is entwined with a few other Internet companies. Twitter’s founders are Evan Williams, Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey. A few years before Twitter’s founders are Evan Williams, Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey. A few years before Twitter was born, Williams created Blogger, a popular Web journal service. Internet giant Google purchased Blogger, and Williams began to

work directly for Google. Before long, he and Google employee Stone left the Internet giant to form a new company called Odeo. Odeo was a podcasting service company. According to Williams, he didn’t have a personal interest in podcasting, and under his guidance, the company temporarily lost focus. However, one of Odeo’s products was just beginning to gather steam: Twitter, a new messaging service. Stone gave Twitter its name, comparing the short spurts of information exchange to the chirping of birds and pointing out that many ring tones sound like bird calls [source: Fost]. As the service became a more important part of Odeo, Stone and Williams decided to form a new company with Twitter as the flagship product. Williams bought out Odeo and Twitter from investors, then combined the existing company and service into a new venture called Obvious Corporation. Jack Dorsey joined the team and began developing new ways for users to interface with Twitter, including through computer applications like instant messaging and e-mail. In March 2006, Twitter split off from Obvious to become its own company, Twitter Incorporated. (Stickland, Jonathan and Chandler, Nathan, no. pag.)

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