Degree Type
Honors Capstone Project
Date of Submission
Spring 5-1-2014
Capstone Advisor
Tej Bhatia, Professor
Honors Reader
Rania Habib, Assistant Professor
Capstone Major
Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics
Capstone College
Arts and Science
Audio/Visual Component
no
Capstone Prize Winner
no
Won Capstone Funding
no
Honors Categories
Social Sciences
Subject Categories
Linguistics
Abstract
The advent of the Internet has led to the creation of new technology, and with it, a whole new language. There has also been resistance both to the technology and to the language. The best example of this would be social media, such as Twitter, Facebook, and texting. Many articles have been written on this subject and how its use is ruining the English language, saying that teenagers are more likely to use chatspeak, such as u for you and r for are, in their writing. I take the opposite position, that the English language is evolving and chatspeak is simply one consequence. This study examines the language change of teenagers using the social media platforms Twitter and Tumblr. I analyzed the tweets and Tumblr posts of 48 high school and college students in 2012 and 2013 and found that chatspeak occurred less than 3% of the time, and its usage decreased as the students got older.
Recommended Citation
Charters, Megan Jeanette, "An Examination of High School and College Students' Chatspeak Use in Twitter and Tumblr" (2014). Honors Capstone Projects - All. 814.
https://surface.syr.edu/honors_capstone/814
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
