Published Online:September 2025
Product Name:The IUP Journal of Soft Skills
Product Type:Article
Product Code:IJSS010925
DOI:10.71329/IUPJSS/2025.19.3.5-18
Author Name:Anusua Majumdar and Sukanya Saha
Availability:YES
Subject/Domain:Management
Download Format:PDF
Pages:5-18
This study examines the ways people use social media. It takes into account their habits and how they create new types of language. An online survey was conducted that involves 39 university students and working professionals. They were asked simple yes-no-neutral questions. The results show that 65 percent of the participants started using new acronyms when talking in person, and 80 percent often tend to shorten their speech in innovative ways. 70 percent use short forms like FYP or ICYMI to show they belong to certain online groups. 45 percent break normal grammar rules to be more creative, 55 percent feel left out when they see digital language that they are unaware of. Many of them also use social media shortcuts, even in formal settings. These findings suggest that teachers, policymakers, and language experts need to include these new digital ways of speaking in lessons and training.
Online communities, “groups of people who come together for a purpose, online” (Dover, 2018), encourage distinct linguistic subcultures driven by geography, age, or shared interests (SiImMsSeEkK, 2025). Social media platforms, whether as ambient-affiliation tools (Sun et al., 2021) or character-limited spaces (Panjaitan & Patria, 2024; Boot et al., 2019), afford rapid lexical coinage and norm erosion (Dembe, 2024; Saha, 2019) while users deploy creative codes to signal identity and enforce group boundaries (Tkachivska, 2016).