The Social Media and Language Use: The Case of Facebook

Abstract

The social media is now the fastest and easiest means of communication; it is very popular and most of its sites are accessible. The Facebook, one of the popular types of the social media is not just common among youngsters; it is very dynamic, user-friendly and specific. This paper using the descriptive design and Technological Determision (TD) theory, investigates the language of the Facebook and discovers that the platform is awash with a lot of cyberslangs, acronyms, morphological shortenings, initialisms, contractions and neologisms. The paper discovers that the writing style of the Facebook departs from the known conventional ways of writing, a situation where a word can be represented in any form deemed fit by the user. Again, it is observed that the flexibility of the platform, its economic sensitivity or time saving nature and its user friendliness makes the platform attractive. But the negative implication of all these is that it is anti-pedagogy and portends great danger to language learning and usage.