An Analysis of English Language Orthography, Typography and Grammar used by Millennial on Social Media Platforms

Social media is a term with which most of the people around the world are well acquainted. The advancement of technology has provided a new medium through which we can propose, deliver, swap, and share our ideas without moving a single inch. It is a new avenue for conveying information and a trend which is now-a-days in vogue. From infants to adults, everyone is somehow in contact with the social media. Similarly, education system too has a profound influence of social media. From placement institutes, school authority, teachers, learners, to parents in fact every stakeholder of education system is somehow tied to social media. Jeff Bezos, CEO at Amazon.com once described the power of social media by asserting that “If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell 6 friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends” (Pencak 2019). Thus, we can assume the potency and status of social media in our life. Though social media is affecting many significant areas of human life, but the area which itself is considered as a ‘systematic means of communication’ (that is ‘Language’) is too being swayed by this virtual medium. Social media has exceedingly affected English language skills. The paper explores how the social media has influenced linguistics habits of millennial, whether it has affected upcoming academicians in a positive or negative way, and what should be done in order to protect their linguistic habits from the negative influence of social media.


Introduction
Social media has now become an old forum for communication and socialization. It has turn out to be people's integrated part of life. Every bits of our life is somehow connected to social media and this is best described by David Crystal as: You wake up at 3 a.m. to go to the bathroom and stop to check your e-mail on the way back to bed. You sign off and your screen says you were on 3 days and 45 minute. You Here is the statistic that shows how much the world is involved in social media. "Social media has become part of the furniture, spanning all generations and all walks of life. It is estimated SMART  that 2.77 billion of us will be using social media by the end of 2019" (Ormerod 2018).
"Facebook is now, by a very wide margin, the biggest social network worldwide. As of the fourth quarter of 2020, Facebook had more than 2.8 billion global monthly active users" (Tankovska 2021). In the fourth quarter of 2020, Twitter had 330 million monthly active users; YouTube is one of the platforms which is in trend and as Through the mentioned statistic it is understood that social media trend is not only the tale of one nation but of the whole world. In our life the role of social media is crucial; it is not an appendage extra but an indispensable part of our daily routine. It has affected every spheres of our life and one of the significant spheres that are being affected by the influence of social media is our language. Whether it is mother tongue (here in India it is Hindi) or our second language (English), both are deeply affected by the inclusion of social media in our lives.
Before exploring the objectives of this paper, it is necessary to understand what exactly Social Media is and how it has affected the major channel of communication (i.e. Language).
People considered social media only in term of apps that are in vogue like Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram, but social media is an umbrella term and include lots of other platforms. Jagtap  In all these expression and sharing of views and contents, one aspect plays a significant role. It not only connects user of various platforms of social media and but also enables people to put their views in the form of text and that aspect is Language. But the language most people adhere to on social media is Textese. "In such language, standard spelling conventions and grammar rules are often disregarded and the use of "textisms" is prevalent" (Verheijen 2013: 583). Verheijen has mentioned Time, Space, Money and Trends are the significant reason behind the use of textism on social media platforms. In order to save time, space and money people are sticking to this "orthographically unconventional language". In addition to these factors, one more factor Verheijen (2019)  Objectives of the Study :  To explore how social media is affecting linguistic habits of Millennial it up to meeting. So they were asked to export the chats, post, statuses and comments through email.
The corpus was collected using the screenshot feature of the smart phone. Screenshots were taken of the chats, post, comments and statuses and participants were asked to transfer the screenshots to the pen drive provided to them. After the collection of screenshots, research participants were asked the reasons behind the use of textism in conversation and they stated various reasons for defying of English orthographic and typographic norms on social media platforms. These were then classified by the researcher into eight categories (see Discussion section).
There were total one hundred and thirty-two raw screenshots and out of them, onehundred and twenty-seven screenshots were chosen on the basis of the textism found in them and the other parameter for the selection was number of words and the content (see Parameters for data collection Section). There are twenty-one types of textism discussed by the researcher in the research paper. Then the next task was to hide the identity of the screenshots and mark the textese in those screenshots. This was done with help of Paint tool programme of Microsoft Window. Using the Microsoft Excel Sheet, the data was stored and analyzed and graphical summary was prepared.
Parameters for data collection  The researcher has collected the data by personally meeting and interviewing the participants. With the permission of the participants their conversations, comments, statuses, and posts were seen, captured and analyzed. They were captured with the help of screenshot and later analyzed by the researcher.  Out of sixty-one participants, four participants were not able to meet personally, so the researcher corresponded with them on WhatsApp program and asked them to export those chats which they feel comfortable in sharing with the researcher through email.
WhatsApp has the feature of exporting the chat, through this feature whole chat gets exported through email and other sharing apps. Since these chats were raw and contained unnecessary data too, whole chats are not analyzed by the researcher.
Researcher has selected the required corpuses from them and then done the analysis.  The whole conversation is not selected for analysis. Just the part of the conversation is taken for analysis. That is, from where the topic/discussion is triggered (minimum four dialogues consisting of 38 words).
Regarding the ethics of research, the researcher has candidly talked about the whole programme that is, why the chats are required, what will be done with the screenshots of those chats and the researcher had convinced the participants that the data will solely be used for research purpose and assured the participants regarding the privacy of their conversations and their identities. Thereby, maintaining the ethics of research. In addition to this, researcher has completely hid the identity of the chats using the paint tool application.

Findings
The analysis of the data collected from the research participants unfolds the significant characteristics of participants' linguistic habits i.e. how social media has affected their linguistic habit. "The flouting of orthographic and typographic norms and linguistic and typographic playfulness are evident" (Danet and Herring 2007:12) in the collected data. They have frequently used the following "non-standard typographic and orthographic forms" (Thurlow 2013:6). The researcher has made twenty-one categories in order to highlight textism in the collected data. It is unfeasible to include all the screenshots of collected data here. Thus, small glimpse of collected data is provided (see Appendix 2): 1 3. Contraction: Shortening the word by deleting letters, usually letters that have vowel sounds are deleted. In some cases, participants have not just deleted vowels but also words and phrase. The participants have made use of words like 'knw'-'know', 'cn'-  Participants have used them many times in their conversation. 1. For bringing more emotion and effectiveness to the conversation Research participants were of the view that by elongating the spelling of words (for examples: soooo, finallyyyy, yess, yasssss, waitinggg and so on), they are able to add more emotions to the word. Suppose the word 'finallyyy, for them this word is more expressive than the word 'finally'. Former word represents that after a very hard effort someone have reached or achieved something and one can imagine the emotion of the speaker or the sender, while later too represent the same, but with less effectiveness. Similarly the word 'Yesss' or 'Yasssss' for Yes'; 'Sooooooo' for 'so' and many more textism are seen in collected data.

Lack of knowledge
Because of lack of knowledge of grammatical structure, some participants were of the view that in order to avoid the grammatical mistake, they use this strategy of putting the concrete words together along with hashtags (for examples: #BookingOpenForZero) for conveying the message. Instead of writing 'The ticket booking has started for the film Zero', they prefer to write in concise way (e.g. BookingOpenForZero, #revokeSedition#WeareAligs#WeareONE, #against#every#wrong) and this way does not require much knowledge of grammar.

Laziness and Busy schedule
Though technology has helped us in accomplishing various tasks swiftly, but it has turned us indolent too. Typing of complete sentence requires both mental and physical efforts. So just to avoid these efforts millennial make use of various tricks for short and snappy communication on social media for examples putting the content words together along with hashtag, use of typical abbreviation, and so on.

Attempting to save time
Busy schedule is also one of the reasons stated by the participants for the digression from the standard word formation and sentence construction. Therefore in order to reply quickly and effectively, they prefer to make use of compact spelling, memes, Gifs, etc. Gifs, memes are done mostly in informal context and conversation (conversation with friends, family and colleagues). As these contexts are more relaxed and use of these deviations often involve people that we know on a more personal level. In addition to this, social media platform has enabled one to form friends from distance and because of which now people have at least 200 friends on Facebook, 100 followers on Instagram and similar numbers on other social media handle. This has lead to the increase in communication. Therefore the responsibility on the shoulder of the person is increased now. Earlier he/she has to reply to four-five friends now he/she has to reply to so many friends available on different platforms of social media.

To flaunt
The deviation in words spelling and sentence construction are blazing a trail nowadays.
Participants have expressed that the social media platform provides freedom, there is no restriction while doing deviation and moreover this deviation are setting trend. So they too prefer to do alteration and plunge into this trend.

To gain Attention
For some participants, deviation in word and sentence constructions, use of Gifs, use of emoticons, etc. catch more attention than the message typed in simple way.

No correspondence between letter and sound
Since there is no correspondence between letters of the alphabet and sounds they stand for, some participants were of the views that sometimes they are not able to recall the right spelling of the word they want to type; so according to how the word sounds, they form its spelling. For example one participant has used 'asgnmnt' for 'assignment', 'cruz' for 'cruise'.

Recommendations
Language learning is a process of habit formation. The more often something is repeated, the stronger the habit and greater the learning (Bell 2016). Consequently, when we use deviant form of language repeatedly, this will soon become our habit and we will continue to use these forms everywhere irrespective of the context. On social media platform this deviation does not affect much but in terms of academics this new language poses a threat. This newly formed language of social media is the combination of non-standard orthography, typography, weird memes, Gifs, and emoticons. This language is not formed on the basis of some norms and conventions. People are using and learning social media language from the posts of adept users of the social media and then start using and applying this deviant language accordingly. From phonetics to Pragmatics, this new language is not formed on any rules and convention. It is just the uncertain modification which social media users made in the standard norms of English language according to their use and needs. It is not like, that the social media has only affected language in bad way, it has some positive impact too, like: it enables one to express freely without thinking much about conventions of the language, provides platform to put one's views, enables one to put one's opinion on public platform, gives opportunity to the language nerds to experiments with language by posting poems, stories, articles, etc. on social media platforms and some more.
So it is recommended that one should not completely discard the standard orthography and typography of English language while communicating on social media platforms and should try not to let the use of deviant form of language to become your linguistics habits. This can be done by listening, speaking, reading and writing of good academics and non-academics audios, videos and books respectively.
Millennial should try to make use of standard conventions of English language as much as possible in their posts. This will not only help them to upgrade their writing skills but through this they will inspire and help other to make use of appropriate and intelligible language in their writing of social media posts and comments.
Since the social media has become the need nowadays, it is difficult to completely abolish its negative effects. So one thing can be done, that is, use it intelligently. In a nutshell, use it not just for the sake of doing communication but also for making the conversation commendable, fathomable and acceptable globally.

Conclusion
From the interviews and data collected in this study, it is clear that the main reason behind the use of these deviant form of English language is to express oneself and what you are feeling (i.e. communication) effectively. On social media platform this deviation does not affect much but in terms of academics this new language poses a threat. Participants have blurred the conventional English language norms in quest of being more social and intimate.
These deviant forms when used frequently will become part of our linguistic habits. It is concluded that, though social media has given us medium to express ourselves through various ways like deviant spelling of words, deviant grammatical structures, memes, hashtags, emoticons, etc. but one should try best not to make this deviant form of language as part of his/her linguistic habits because this habit will interfere in their academic studies and create hurdles in the accomplishment of language skills.