Transformative impact of Social Media platforms on Language Evolution: Creation and Adoption of Emerging Lexicon

Abstract

The present research aims to investigate the language changes caused by the integration of social media sites with special reference to the usage of new jargon and emerging language among young social media users. This study employs quantitative questionnaires from 40 participants and qualitative interviews with 10 participants purposively sampled to understand the pattern of language by social media. The survey examined the frequency and the tendencies of such changes as abbreviations, informal structure of the sentence, and use of emojis in communication and identified considerable changes in user’s attitudes to the language. Employing Braun and Clarke’s (2016) thematic analysis, this paper builds upon qualitative materials and elaborates on how social media opens creative possibilities, enables code-switching, and renegotiates linguistic imagination. Consequently, the research suggests that social media fosters language use that embraces variance and innovation more than stagnation and stability in conventional English grammar and punctuation. Participants also claimed that a wide range of unknown vocabulary was also reported due to exposure to the different dialects and trends in the current world usage. As such, this research identifies social media as an active facilitator of linguistic change, which underlines the rate of language development by creating a novel interaction typology that reshapes users’ perceptive of prescriptive norms. These implications are useful for further research into the semiotic aspects of digital communication and for understanding the tendencies of informal language use among youths.