The Impacts of Social Media on Morphological Changes

Abstract

The developments of social media have also contributed greatly to the evolution of language, especially morphological developments like abbreviations, acronyms, blending, clipping, compounding and employing emoticons (emojis). This paper will discuss how digital communication systems hasten and transform the process of word construction, creating new linguistic strategies of succinctness, expressiveness and urgency. Social media is conducive to the use of abbreviations (SS, BTW) and acronyms (FOMO, YOLO) because of the limitations of characters and speedy communication. Combining (brunch, motel) and combining (selfie stick, photobomb) proves to be creative in terms of blending ideas in a brief manner. Clipping (pic meaning picture, app meaning application) indicates an inclination to be efficient and emoticons serve as visual morphemes, either as a complement or substitute to text in order to add tone and emotion.

This study examines the information available on such sites as Instagram, facebook, tiktok and youtube to discover the tendencies in morphological changes with the help of a qualitative approach. This paper explores how digital communication have lead to morphological changes, including the proliferation of different morphological processes. The research concludes that social media acts as a catalyst for morphological innovation, shaping contemporary communication in unprecedented ways and it’s upon future research to analyze that how long these morphological changes last.