English Language Has Evolved at a Faster Rate Because of Social Media

According to the leading English language expert in the UK, John Sutherland, Professor Emeritus, University College London, there is a wide generational gap between parents and children today when it comes to the use of modern informal language. This is due to instant messaging and social media.

This new informal language has been causing the English language to evolve at such a faster rate compared to any period in the history of its development.

Professor Sutherland has been conducting a study on informal language, such as “text speak” and common social media terms. What he found out was that most parents were bewildered by the language used by children today, with a huge percentage of them saying that their children use a totally different language on popular social media sites that they do not understand.

Out of the 2,000 parents who were surveyed, only about 10 percent of them were able to tell the true meaning of terms like “bae” (an affectionate term) and “fleek” (good looking). Forty-three percent of the surveyed parents said that they did not know what these terms were. “Fleek” was at the top of the list of terms that nearly half of the parents did not understand, followed by FOMO or “fear of missing out” and “bae.”

During the past few years, the invention and use of acronyms in text messaging was due to the limitation in the number of characters one can input on old handsets, thus it gave birth to such acronyms as M8, GR8, TXT, GTG and L8RZ. However, the technological revolution has rendered these text speak language as antique or even extinct.

The advent of social media sites where people can chat for hours and with the need of some people to type faster have given rise to new social media acronyms or social media shorthand, which most parents failed to decipher. Other acronyms that made it to the list of new terms parents failed to comprehend include ICYMI (in case you missed it), NSFW (not safe for work), TBT (throwback Thursday) and other terms such as Deadout (tired, rubbish), Thirsty (looking for attention), RN (right now) and LMK (let me know).

Professor Sutherland is predicting that emojis (smileys that originated in Japan) might be the next phase in the sphere of online communication and language. According to him the rise in the use of icons has a historical link, whereby the modern people are moving towards a pictographic way of communicating, just like during the time of the cavemen when a single picture could express a wide range of emotions and meanings or messages.

There is another reason for the rise of these new acronyms. With the technologically advanced cell phones and the proliferation of social media sites, teenagers have developed a new vocabulary that their parents would not understand. The turnover could be quick because as the older people learn the new acronyms and terms, they are immediately transformed again. The professor said that his study indicated that this is a barbed wire for parents, something that locks them out of their children’s inner circle.

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