Magic of Twitter

The art of creating something new has given way to the construction of new languages. In the past decade, we saw many movies and TV series inventing new languages to attract and engage their audiences, be it Dothraki and Valyrian for HBO’s Game of Thrones, Kilikili spoken by the Kalakeyas in the film Baahubali, Shiväisith heard in the movie Thor: The Dark World and Na’vi in Avatar. In the same way, the site which was introduced in the year 2006 which has today become a platform for global chatter has more or less created a new language for its users.
The shortened words, slangs and hash-tag have the transformed the way we communicate in our day to day life. The metadata tags that were created to promote topics and help people group a tweet to follow a conversation easy have now become brand representatives. Tweeters used this purposeful tagging function so that they could express their thoughts in a limited word limit and so the roller coaster ride began. The language which was once foreign to us has now ingrained and become a part of our pop culture.
Every social media platform has today adopted the lingo and the frequently use these words. It is observed that people do this acquire social acceptance, users using this language are termed as cool people. We have actually started behaving like our ancestors, where we try to become a part of a community on the basis of political interest, hobbies, occupation and age. The most common changes that are observed is that people tend to shorten the ends of their words, replacing ‘ing’ with ‘in’ or ‘er’ with ‘a’ so that their tweets won’t exceed the word limit.
We were actually baffled when we heard abbreviations like LMAO and LOL for the first time in a conversation. Now we follow the same communication etiquettes in our speech. Our conversations comprise words like KK, DP, going to, OMFG, WTF, YOLO, YOYO and the list is never-ending. The complexity does not end by understanding the on-going lingo, and using it properly and appropriately, but the challenge is keeping your Twitter vocabulary up to date. There is also a non-standardized language that is specific to a geographical area. Twitter can actually make you feel exceptionally old, it’s because the language is getting a bit out of control in my opinion.
The online course providers have also stated capitalizing on the fact that this form of communication has gone rogue. There are guides and crash courses available for tweets which were once filled with codes, shorthand, and weird formatting — which nobody bothered to explain. The 330 million monthly active users microblogging site has recently decided to double it word limit as people were not able to express their thoughts and emotions and in turn the quality was deteriorating. Will this change curb the inventions of new lingo and slang? Will we stop using words like btw, b4, and b/c, FOMO, WCW, and MCM, in our messages? Will people stop cramming their ideas now? Or will this form reach a new dimension?
It’s too early to comment on what changes this will bring, but rest assured users won’t come up with single character or symbols that represent the entire world like the Chinese and Koreans respectively do. It’s also okay if you don’t understand the different ways of hash-tagging and to have your own multiple linguistic approaches to tweet is awesome. Enjoy the twitter language because some of these terms are just plain funny! LOL & HAND