Internet Slang: An up and coming Language

About 5,400 new words are created each day in the English language; the internet being a contributing factor of this occurrence. Since the mid90s, with the creation of the first social media--Six Degrees--internet forums and social media sites have been a prevalent part of our lives and cultures. Because the majority of people spend hours online, it is no surprise that interactions on the web have resulted in new colloquialisms. 


Brief History of Social Media

  • Mid90s: Six Degrees is first recognized social media created 

  • Mid2000s: creation of MySpace and Facebook marks an increase interest in social media

  • Early 2010s: Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr gain popularity 

  • Late 2010s-Now: TikTok immerges as a social media giant 


The origin of internet slang and colloquialisms is dependent on the social media site and the youth who were active on that site. For example, letter Homophones like LOL and OMG were popularized by millennials on sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Early Instagram in the mid2000s-early 2010s.


Popular Types of Slang

  • Letter homophones: abbreviations for words like TTYL,LOL,OMG

  • Purposeful Misspelling of words: To avoid being monitored or censored by TikTok algorithms, certain words have a unique spelling on the internet. For example lesbian is known as le$bean. 

  • Emojis: Emojis were intended to convey emotion over text. However, emojis have adapted to convey other emotions than intended or be a symbol of a certain object. Ex: a crying face emoji can be used to communicate laughter 

  • Novel Syntactic Features: Unusual syntactic structures in sentences. Ex: You are doing me a frighten.


I have only scratched the surface of a deep sea of internet language and communication in this blog post. The linguistics of the internet and social media is a complex system that will shape how younger generations will communicate for years to come. 




Comments

  1. Kaitlin CalleFebruary 27, 2022 at 7:40 PM

    I really like how you branched off into internet slang from what we did in class. It was really interesting that you included how internet slang came about because I didn’t know that before. This was really informative!

    ReplyDelete

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