Using smartphone texting applications to help students Contents introduction

2. The popularity of slang.

Social media managed to bring English slang to a new level. It became so popular and widespread that some words stopped being slang at all, but made up part of regular English.How does this slang usually form? There are several ways:

• 
  Sometimes people incorporate numbers into words to shorten them. Thus, l8r stands for later, while b4 means before. As you see, phonetic similarity is a foundation for such slang terms – when a number sounds like a part of other word, why type the whole word? Inserting the number allows to communicate faster.
  
• 
  Then, there are abbreviations that chase the same goal of typing quicker. OH that stands for overheard requires only two keys pressed, while the original word would need 9 pushes!
  
• 
  When people want to get emotional, short forms will not do. Sometimes users enlarge their messages deliberately just to show how excited they are. Many exclamation marks can illustrate this trend, but we should also mention words like yaaaaaaaas. In layman’s language it means yes, but yes is incredibly expressionless compared to its slang brother.
  

The abundance of slang we come across nowadays results from the influence of social media, of course. Let’s see how else these networks influence English.