Presentation Summary - 04/03/2016

Class Presentation - The Effect of Social Media on Language Change & Prescriptivism and Descriptivism. 

Has given us new ways of communicating: 

• Acronyms - 'LOL'
• Abbreviations such as 'cus' instead of 'because'.
• Neologisms which are newly coined words, phrases or expressions - ie 'selfie' 
• Twitter has restricted users - 140 makes users shorten words and express their feelings in other ways. They can also categorize their tweets with hashtags which have taken over popular culture, and have found their way into our everyday language. 
• Limited characters: let people get their point across quicker, use emoticons and hashtags and are more eye catching and more likely to be read. 

  Benefits:

• Boost creativity. 
• More likely to notice grammatical issues and misspellings.
• Saves time.

Disadvantages: 

• Some made up words are not liked/considered real words.
• Ie. Selfie, Photobomb, Yolo

Prescriptivism:

• The prescriptivism attitude is describes as giving a judgement about whether language use/change is 'good' or 'bad', 'correct' or 'incorrect'. 
• John Humphrey's is a prescriptivist: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/3656080/Mind-your-language-it-matters.html

Descriptivism: 

• Happy to explore and embrace the change in language.
• Jean Aitchinson: http://www.slideshare.net/Robertagillum/language-change-theories
• Crumbling Castle, Damp Spoon and Infectious Disease theories/myths.