The Impact of Social Media on Language Transition
Dragana Kostica, Serbia
Dragana Kostica is Belgrade-based editor in chief and founder of Still in Belgrade art, culture and club scene magazine. She holds a Master of Arts in Cultural Policy and Management in Arts (MA of Arts) and a Bachelor degree in Archaeology. Currently, she is searching for the right PhD programme. Her research interests are focused on creative industries, creative cities, cultural heritage, marketing in culture, media and new technologies.
Email: draganakostica1987@gmail.com
Menu
Introduction
Background
Examples
Conclusions
Notes
References
This piece of research examines the transition of language and its evolution in accordance with the new requirements and types of communications through qualitative content, document and literature analysis. The usage of social media is connected with communication, therefore language and language communication as well – in that both signs and symbols, seem to be evolving together with the development of technology and internet, thus creating a new system of “social media language” which seem to be entering the sphere of every day conversation. As we already know social media is closely connected with the rise of Web 2.0, a platform that allows internet users to interact and collaborate with each other in a social media dialogue as creators of user-generated content in a virtual community, as opposed to the web sites where people are limited to the passive viewing of the content. Social Examples of Web 2.0 include as follows: social networking sites, blogs, wikis, video sharing sites, hosted services, web applications and mash ups. It represents an invention of Tim Berners Lee, whose vision was to create a new collaborative medium, a place where people around the globe can meet, read and write as described in Social Media Marketing E-Book.
There are many definitions of language, but one of the best known is defined by a Swiss linguist and semiotician Ferdinand de Saussure whose ideas laid the foundation for many significant developments both in linguistics and semiology in the 20th century.
“Langue (French, meaning "language") and parole (meaning "speaking") are linguistic terms distinguished by Ferdinand de Saussure in his “Course in General Linguistics”. Langue encompasses the abstract, systematic rules and conventions of a signifying system; it is independent of, and pre-exists individual users. Langue involves the principles of language, without which no meaningful utterance, "parole", would be possible. Parole refers to the concrete instances of the use of langue. This is the individual, personal phenomenon of language as a series of speech acts made by a linguistic subject” (Saussere1986:9-10).
Language can be defined as a fluid entity which is prone to evolution, change and development in accordance with social and cultural aspects of the era and area in which it develops. In the era of ICT that seems to have engulfed most of the modern world; language is increasingly changing and taking its rather rapid form. With the advent of the internet firstly and even more so WEB 2.0 changes have been observed not only in English but also in a number of other languages. Social media is connected with the rise of Web 2.0, a platform that allows internet users to interact and collaborate with each other in a social media dialogue as creators of user-generated content in a virtual community, in contrast to Web sites where people are limited to the passive viewing of content. Examples of Web 2.0 include as follows: social networking sites, blogs, wikis, video sharing sites, hosted services, web applications and mash ups. It represents an invention of Tim Berners Lee, whose vision was to create a new collaborative medium, a place where people around the globe can meet, read and write. Social media has accelerated the speed of communication. Facebook lets users to communicate quickly, effectively and efficiently because written exchanges tend to be concise and shared between all the friends you are connected with, meaning you only need to write them once. While on Twitter there’s a 140 character limit in that the users are literally forced to make the statement brief.
The usage of social media is connected with communication, therefore language and language communication –both signs and symbols seem to be evolving together with development of technology and internet, thus creating a new system of “social media language” which is entering the sphere of everyday speech.
Social media is literary creating new abbreviations, acronyms, nouns, verbs and meanings. In 2011 the words “retweet,” “sexting” and “cyberbullying” were all added to the Oxford English Dictionary1. “The word “selfie” appeared in 2002 for the first time in an Australian forum and it was named the word of the year by Oxford dictionary in the year 2013 when it gained its momentum throughout the English-speaking world as it evolved from a social media buzzword to mainstream shorthand for a self-portrait photograph. Its linguistic productivity is already evident in the creation of numerous related spin-off terms showcasing particular parts of the body like helfie (a picture of one’s hair) and belfie (a picture of one’s posterior); a particular activity – welfie (workout selfie) and drelfie (drunken selfie), and even items of furniture – shelfie and bookshelfie”2. Other new words added to the Oxford Dictionary include "woot" (used to express enthusiasm in online communication), “unfriend” the word of the year 20093 additionally online acronyms "LOL" and "OMG" were also added. However, social network Facebook announced that acronym “LOL” was less used in the previous year among their users replacing it with “xexe” or “xaxa” or simply with an emoticon in virtual communication from which it can be concluded that the trends in language and communication seem to be changing each year4. Interestingly, in 2015 for the first time ever in the history of Oxford Dictionary a pictograph was chosen as the word of the year.“ Oxford Dictionaries explained that Face with Tears of Joy-emoticon was chosen as the ‘word’ that best reflected the ethos, mood, and preoccupations of 2015. Attached research informs us that, although emoticons have been around since the late 1990s, they seem to have experienced their greatest increase in usage ever in 2015; “Face with Tears of Joy” accounted for a whopping 17 percent of all emoticon shared in the U.S. this year”5.It seems that in the year 2015 we are moving back from vocal writing which has been developing for thousands of years to the pictorial one again.
Nevertheless, social media seem to have opened up a brand new range of professions that were supposed to come up with names and label them with words. In this way, today there are new professions which to be someone’s livelihood, such as the jobs of bloggers, instagramers, twitterers, social media managers, social media marketing managers, application developers and so on. Moreover, in 1970 American writer and futurist Alvin Toffler predicted and noted in his publication called “Future Shock” that society was undergoing an enormous structural change, a revolution from an industrial society to a "super-industrial society". This change mentioned will overwhelm people. He believed the accelerated rate of technological and social change left people disconnected and suffering from "shattering stress and disorientation" that he described as the state of the “future shocked”. In his discussion of the components of such a shock, he popularized the term "information overload” which is one of the hallmarks of today society due to internet and the rest of the current media. According to Alvin Toffler one of the features of the super-industrial society is that people tend to change their profession and their workplace more often than not. There is a need for people to change their professions because professions quickly become outdated in accordance with the new technologies and claims. Formerly reputable professions become redundant and the new ones appear that meet contemporary demands of so called “super-industrial” society. In that way people tend to have many careers in a lifetime. The knowledge of an engineer tends to be outdated in ten years and people look more and more for temporary jobs (Toffler 1970).
It can be concluded that the usage of social media produces neologisms, but additionally it seems to force people to communicate quickly and in a somewhat informal and private manner. It appears to contribute to the evolution of languages and not exclusively English with an emphasis on grammar.
As the author Jon Reed noted “the words that surround us every day influence the words we use. Since so much of the written language we see is now on the screens of our computers, tablets, and smart phones, language now evolves partly through our interaction with technology. And because the language we use to communicate with each other tends to be more malleable than formal writing, the combination of informal, personal communication and the mass audience afforded by social media is a recipe for rapid change. Facebook has also contributed more than most platforms only to offer new meanings for common words such as friend, like, status, wall, page, and profile. Other new meanings which crop up on social media channels also reflect the dark side of social media: a troll is no longer just a character from Norse folklore, but someone who makes offensive or provocative comments online; a sock puppet is no longer merely a puppet made from an old sock, but a self-serving fake online persona”6.
Scholars and even a British actor Ralph Fiennes7 argue that social media mars the English language. But, regardless of all the shortcomings social media impact has a number of upsides in terms of communication, such as teach us how to communicate more effectively and efficiently and teach us how to be concise – twitter co-creator Dom Sagolla has even written a book on getting the most out of 140 characters. With social media we can send our messages to our audience or readership faster than ever before and additionally and inevitably create new words to explain new phenomena in our cyber lives. Additionally, the linguist David Crystal argues that texting has not been a disaster for language many feared; on the contrary it improves not just children’s but people’s writing and spelling. Also the use of initial letters for whole words, such as n for "no", gf for "girlfriend", cmb "call me back" is not at all new phenomena in people’s communication. People have been initialising common phrases for ages. IOU is known dates back to 1618. There is no difference, apart from the medium of communication, between a modern day "lol"-laughing out loud and an earlier generation's "Swalk" -"sealed with a loving kiss8. As author Alvin Toffler stressed out with reference to lexicographer Stuart Berg Flexner, former senior editor of the Random House Dictionary of the English Language, "The words we use are changing faster today—and not merely on the slang level, but on every level. The rapidity with which words come and go is hugely accelerated. This seems to be true not only of English, but of French, Russian and Japanese as well”. According to Alvin Toffler’s book Flexner illustrated this with the suggestion that out of the estimated 450,000 "usable" words in the English language today, only around 250,000 would be comprehensible to William Shakespeare. Were Shakespeare suddenly to materialize in London or New York today, he would be able to understand, on average, only five out of every nine words in English language vocabulary. He would be a semi-literate person (Toffler 1970:169). One must not forget the fact that this book was written back in the 70s where there was much fewer words and less influence of technology than in the present day.
When speaking about language, communication, internet, technologies and the social media one cannot help but address the issue of challenging the idea of literacy in the future? What about today? If a person is not familiar with social media sociolects does it mean it is illiterate? Social media language shifts and evolves quickly together with developments of new software and technologies and platforms therefore in the near future we are bound to need to follow and learn social media ‘language’ if we want to be considered literate in our social context.
1 Coupmedia, “OMG! Is social media eroding our language?”, http://www.coupmedia.com/blog/2012/11/23/omg-is-social-media-eroding-our-language, accessed on the 13th of July
2 Blog.oxforddictionaries, “Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2013”, http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/press-releases/oxford-dictionaries-word-of-the-year-2013/, accessed on the 13th of July
3 Telegraph, M. Holehouse “Woot! Retweet and sexting enter the dictionary”, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturenews/8708448/Woot-Retweet-and-sexting-enter-the-dictionary.html, accessed on the 20th of July
4 KQED, “The Death of LOL: New Study Reports The Acronym’s Decline and What’s Taking Its Place”, http://ww2.kqed.org/pop/2015/08/10/the-death-of-lol-new-study-reports-the-acronyms-decline-and-whats-taking-its-place/, accessed on the 21st of September
5 YAHOO, D. Bean “Oxford Dictionaries Chooses an Emoji for Its 2015 ‘Word of the Year”, https://www.yahoo.com/tech/oxford-dictionaries-chooses-an-emoji-for-its-203808213.html, accessed on the 17st of November
6 Blog. Oxford dictionaries, Reed J.“How social media is changing language”, http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2014/06/social-media-changing-language/, accessed on the 13 of July
7 Coupmedia, “OMG! Is social media eroding our language?”, http://www.coupmedia.com/blog/2012/11/23/omg-is-social-media-eroding-our-language, accessed on the 13th of July
8 The Guardian, Self W., Truss L. “2B or not 2B?”, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/jul/05/saturdayreviewsfeatres.guardianreview, accessed on the 10th of July
Crystal D. (2008). Txtng: The Gr8 Db8,OUP Oxford
De Saussure F. (1986). Course in general linguistics (3rd ed.). (R. Harris, Trans.). Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company. p. 9-10
Social Media Marketing E-Book, SEOP INC. p 4-5
Toffler A. (1970). Future Shock , Random house, United States
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