Is Internet Language a Destroyer to Communication?

Abstract

Internet language is known as the new form of language that has been used on social media by the Internet users. Since the Internet language has been widely used through social media, there is some influence on the users’ behaviour. As a result, the use of the Internet language is feared to undermine the authenticity of the original language. Language is a significantly important communication tool for everyone, and hence, there are many studies on human communication. As the emergence of the Internet is growing fast, language has been affected and caused by the inventions of Internet language which is also known as Internet slang. It is also now widely used by people in their daily communication. However, there are several problems caused by Internet language. For example, people who seldom use the Internet could not understand the Internet language which might cause communication problems, the loss of language authenticity, and generation gap. As the study of Internet language is not broad, a few problems still remain unknown such as the communication habits of Internet language users, the level of understanding of the original language, and how elders are out of touch with contemporary society due to the Internet language. Quantitative research method which is an online survey is used to study the generation Z who were born from 1997 to 2012 and baby boomers who were born from 1955 to 1964. The reason why this research targets these selected samples is to investigate the generation gap between gen Z and baby boomers that the Internet language brings to them. The research is intended to investigate how the Internet language affects human communication habits. This research has found out that the Internet language has actually affected human communication habits, because the Internet language has become a part and parcel of their communication style.