The Five-Minute Linguist - Bite-sized Essays on Language and Languages Third Edition - Caroline Myrick

The Five-Minute Linguist - Bite-sized Essays on Language and Languages Third Edition - Caroline Myrick

53. How is Language Used on Social Media?

The Five-Minute Linguist - Bite-sized Essays on Language and Languages Third Edition - Caroline Myrick

Lauren Squires [+-]
The Ohio State University
Lauren Squires is Associate Professor in the Department of English at The Ohio State University, where she teaches courses in English linguistics (including the grammar and history of English) and language and media (including digital media). Her research interests include the sociolinguistics of computer-mediated communication, language in media and popular culture, language ideologies, and sociolinguistic processing of dialect differences.

Description

Language in social media is much the same as language in other contexts: it exhibits variation that reflects individual and group identities, users shape it to serve their communicative purposes, and it intimately reflects the foundational knowledge speakers have of their language. Yet language in social media is also shaped by other factors, including literacy—navigating social media draws on multiple literacies—and the affordances of whatever medium is under consideration—such as character allotments, reply structures, degrees of publicness, and features such as hashtags. Thus, social media users produce language that is simultaneously “just like” language everywhere else, but also subject to “special” considerations.

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Citation

Squires, Lauren. 53. How is Language Used on Social Media?. The Five-Minute Linguist - Bite-sized Essays on Language and Languages Third Edition. Equinox eBooks Publishing, United Kingdom. p. 263-266 Jul 2019. ISBN 9781781798553. https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/view-chapter/?id=38173. Date accessed: 29 Mar 2024 doi: 10.1558/equinox.38173. Jul 2019

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