Tweet me slangs: A study of slanguage on twitter

Abstract

Social media users are estimated at over 3.4 billion netizens known for digitally-mediated language innovations and revolutions on cyberspace referred to as internet language of which slangauge is a subset. Slanguage is incorporating slangs which may be incomprehensible without prior knowledge of their meaning irrespective of language competence during communication on and off cyberspace. Research concerns on internet language has described its forms, motivations, functions as well as impact on English language. Drawing its data from the twitter platform, the concern of this study is to identify popular slangs, domain of use and effect of slanguage on academic and speech performance of university undergraduates. 44 tweets, a self-developed questionnaires administered to 40 randomly selected students from the purposively selected Department of Computer Science, Lead City University, Ibadan, and a three-question twitter poll from 94 participants were subjected to statistical analysis and discussed. Findings shows that slanguage is frequently used amongst undergraduates a habit which is not limited to the cyber space but transferred to both formal and informal domains of communication. Slanguage is used during face-face conversation with friend, formal situations and sometimes during academic writing. Although slanguage is believed to have a negative impact on written English it doesn’t impacts undergraduate academic performance negatively. It is recommended that slanguage should be incorporated in the curriculum as a variety of English to be studied at the secondary and higher institution levels. This will teach origin, meaning, appropriate domain of use as well as when slanguage should be considered errors.

Key words: Internet language, Slang, Slanguage, Twitter