Twitter: a valuable tool for linguists

The world of technology is shaping the English language, with innovative advances reflected in new terms.

Of course the explosion of social media has accelerated the creation of new words as different cultures and languages interact.

People are writing much more than we used to. The users of online social media produce an extraordinary amount of text each day. This increased use of electronic communication has given us new language forms and expressions largely driven by operational issues and a need to compensate for lack of non-verbal communication. 

Twitter and other social media offer records of language mutating in real time and space: an immense resource that can offer linguists the opportunity to explore how our words and phrases are changing.

Twitter claims that around 340 million tweets are sent every day. Following someone on Twitter, it is possible to see a word at the moment of its coinage. Because tweets tend to be rather informal, there are a lot of types of creative usages of words. 57% of neologisms on Twitter come from blends.

Networds: new terms coined in the environment of social networks (neologism invented by me).

Sources:

• Using social media to find English lexical blends, P.Cook
• Language lessons told through Twitter

Linguistics: How, Why, How and What with David Crystal

Does Your Language Shape How You Think?

The idea that your mother tongue shapes your experience of the world may be true after all.

When your language routinely obliges you to specify certain types of information, it forces you to be attentive to certain details in the world and to certain aspects of experience that speakers of other languages may not be required to think about all the time. And since such habits of speech are cultivated from the earliest age, it is only natural that they can settle into habits of mind that go beyond language itself, affecting your experiences, perceptions, associations, feelings, memories and orientation in the world.


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