Home / Regular Issue / JSSH Vol. 28 (1) Mar. 2020 / JSSH(S)-1239-20

 

Slangs on Social Media: Variations among Malay Language Users on Twitter

Zulkifli Zulfati Izazi and Tengku Mahadi Tengku-Sepora

Pertanika Journal of Social Science and Humanities, Volume 28, Issue 1, March 2020

Keywords: Internet language, language variations, slangs, social media, Twitter

Published on: 19 March 2020

Twitter, a social media application and a popular microblogging platform, has become a compelling subject in linguistics. The nature of the communication on Twitter is informal, colloquial, and non-standard; and it is likely to contain slangs which is the interest of the modest research embodied in this paper. This study explored the variations of slangs employed by Malay language users through tweets that contained the Malay language keyword ‘makan’ (eat). Primary Qualitative Content Analysis was the research tool employed in this study. Slangs were categorized using an adapted scheme. The analysis found that Malay language users on Twitter implemented a variety of slangs in their online communication, such as shortenings, onomatopoeic spellings, phonetics replacements, inanities, leetspeak, cacography, and emoji. The findings of this study can be useful for developing a lexical database for Malay language slangs.

ISSN 0128-7702

e-ISSN 2231-8534

Article ID

JSSH(S)-1239-20

Download Full Article PDF

Share this article

Recent Articles