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A2 LANGUAGE INVESTIGATION Danielle Wade

Analysis word count: 2813

03/03/2016

How does the character limit on Twitter affect people’s use of language?

INTRODUCTION After using Twitter for a few years, I have noticed that the 140-character limit (160 when posting from mobile) seemingly has an impact on the way people use language on this platform. I noticed people were missing out letters, using letter number homophones and various other techniques to shorten their words in order to fit what they wanted to say into one ‘tweet’. I wanted to look into this a little deeper and see just how much of an impact on language it really has. I wanted to establish whether people were actively changing the way they use language online in order to fit everything in one post or whether they we’re just using normal speech-like text and abbreviations because it was easier to do so. I hoped to achieve this by analysing tweets that were close to hitting word count and those that weren’t. I was particularly interested in finding out whether this was something that most people did regardless of age and gender and if it occurred on both personal and business accounts; because of this I tried to collect data from a range of different accounts. I thought this effect would be more common among the under 25s since they are almost always associated with ‘text speak’, slang and general disregard for the ‘rules’ of the English language. I also assumed that business accounts would remain professional and continue to use Standard English, while personal accounts would use slang much more casually as they didn’t have a professional reputation to uphold. While I was carrying out this investigation I found Fairclough’s ideas on the features of the spoken mode to be very helpful.

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MEHODOLOGY I collected my data by asking friends and family if they would be willing to participate in my investigation, if they gave approval, I formally asked for their permission via email. To obtain the permission of the professional accounts I followed the same procedure by asking the owners of the accounts if they would allow me to use their tweets in my report. To avoid observer’s paradox, I selected my data before I sent out my permission request to the account holder then once I had obtained their permission I began my analysis. This protected the validity of my samples by ensuring that the tweets would be unedited and genuine. To collect my data, I chose a selection of tweets that were close to hitting the character limit and some which weren’t. This would allow me to see if the language used was natural or because they were trying to stay within the character limit. I will be analysing the language used in the tweets using a variety of frameworks including grammar, lexis, discourse, phonology and orthography. I will predominantly be looking at morphology, orthography and informalisation.

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ANALYSIS Personal accounts

Tweet A, 19 year old, female, Rotherham. The language used has an informal tone but is mostly correct. The first non-standard aspect I noticed was the lexical shortening of ‘university’ to “uni”. This is a common shortening in spoken language especially among students and seems to be becoming more popular in written language as time goes by. In addition to the lexis being affected, the flow of discourse was also affected by the character limit. The account owner missed out the modal auxiliary ‘have’. The correct wording would be ‘you know you have/you’ve’ but this was left out. By doing this the original meaning remains the same as the main lexical elements of the sentence are still recognisable (the subject, object, nouns etc.) and a verb is removed. The auxiliary ‘have’ is commonly removed in northern areas of the UK, where the author is from, which could be an alternative explanation for the removal of this grammatical feature. In addition to this, the ‘tweet’ contains the use of ‘emoticons’ in the form of a laughing face. This allows the author to insert her emotion and facial expressions at the time into her post. Linguists Titjen and Saunders wrote “using emoticons is one way of connecting our feeling in the texts that we create” and it is “the online means of showing our facial expressions and gestures”. This is demonstrated clearly here and changes the tone of the post to make it more light-hearted and amusing. Total characters: 112

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Tweet B, 21 year old, female, Middlesbrough. The tweet begins with a very informal tone by showing no concern to the character limit by deliberately changing the orthography of ‘love’ to “lurve” adding an additional character to mimic the pronunciation. This emphasises the emotion she is wanting to convey to her audience by using non-standard lexis and shows the informality of her tweet. However, in the next sentence of the same tweet she uses lexical shortening to change ‘beautiful’ to “beaut”. This is again something that appears frequently in spoken language but saves the writer four characters. The meaning of the word is still easy to understand but doing this allows the writer to add additional information. More emotions are conveyed in this tweet via the use of the ‘love’ emoticon, which allows her to emphasise her feelings to her readers. This tweet also contains a link showing that there is more text on another blogging platform, ‘Instagram’. By doing this she has allowed herself to make a larger post but has still kept a large amount of non-standard grammar showing that her language is not all that affected by the character limit. Total characters: 100 +22 (for links)

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Tweet C, 21 year old, female, Sheffield. The discourse is affected right away with this tweet as the personal pronoun ‘I’ and the verb ‘have’ are missing from the beginning of the sentence, after being deemed an unnecessary aspect to the understanding of the tweet. She chooses instead to start with the adverb “just” and continues immediately into her sentence. This user has included the contraction “c’mon” instead of the standard ‘come on’ which allowed her to keep another four characters. This also contributed to the informal nature of the tweet as she was speaking to the hockey players she knows well. Finally, she uses the nickname “tommo” to refer to one of the players. Yet again saving characters, when combined the characters she accumulated by altering her use of the English language allowed her enough space in her tweet to include another hashtag. This in turn would get her tweet more publicity and make it visible to a wider audience than just her own followers. The way this person uses language, while very well adapted to the Twitter platform, could be seen as her Northern accent and dialect showing through in her writing. Total characters: 118

Tweet D, 19 year old, female, Rotherham. This tweet begins quite formally with correct punctuation use creating a complex sentence, however, it finishes in complete informality with the phonological elision of ‘you’ and ‘know’ forming “yano”. This was most likely done because the writer ran out of characters and had to ‘blend’ the words together to fit them into the tweet but again, this has become well used in text speak and reflects in the pronunciation of the words in everyday language. Total characters: 74

Tweet E, 18 year old, female, Leeds and Sheffield. She begins her post with a contraction of ‘you’, ‘are’ and ‘all’, making “y’all”. This colloquialism is commonly used in the south of the USA but is becoming more common in British English as it is integrated through media such as Twitter. This contraction is a very simple way to save around five characters which is important in this tweet as the writer is trying to explain her entire opinion on teenagers dealing with the police in one tweet. This user also uses lexical shortening, something I am noticing to be very common in tweets. She shortened ‘because’ into “cause”, this only saves two characters but again this shortening is common in spoken language, specifically in the North of England. By using slang again, she keeps the informal, speech like tone to her writing. 5

Finally, she uses initialism at the end of the tweet shortening ‘shake my head’ into “smh”. By doing this the informality of her writing is cemented. This initialism is still fairly new and can only be understood with prior knowledge as the writer assumes the reader will understand due to members resources. Total characters: 111

Tweet G, 47 year old, female, Dronfield. She begins her post using initialism to shorten ‘Women Cycling Sheffield’, the name of the club she cycles with into “WCS”. This change saves valuable character space, but the initialism is very common already in both spoken and written English as it is the name of a company which leads me to believe this change may not be a direct result of the character limit but an accepted, know shorthand. She also abbreviated ‘including’ into “inc.”, again an accepted shorthand, reducing it right down allowing her to shift the focus onto the parts of the tweet she thought most important, such as saying that they did the Rapha women’s 100km challenge. The apostrophe was also missed out of “womens” which could be attributed to either a spelling error or to save space. I originally thought that tweets from the over 25s would have more standard English than slang and colloquialisms. While this user does use the correct form of writing an abbreviation, adding a fullstop after the end of the abbreviation, she uses more non-standard English than I thought. Total characters: 22 + 22 (for picture)

Tweet F, private account, 19 year old, , female, Rotherham. Because Tweet F was taken from a private account, I assumed that the text would take on a very informal, almost diary-like personal tone. I thought this would be the case as the author doesn’t have to worry about the people that they know viewing their tweets, as a consequence of this, I thought the rules of language, and spelling and grammar would take somewhat of a backseat to what the user was trying to express. She begins her tweet by missing out the personal pronoun ‘I’, this is something she deemed unnecessary since it is a private account and all the tweets are assumed to be personal to her, this is rarely seen in spoken language. The second feature I noticed was that she has abbreviated ‘pretty’ right down into a single consonant, again something only people with inside knowledge would know as this is incredibly informal and still is not very common even in spoken language, however, it does save valuable characters which can be used later on. 7

The user makes use of a hashtag incorporated into the middle of her statement. The word used in the hashtag is a blend of ‘picture’ and ‘slip’, this was ‘trending’ on Twitter at the time so it needed to be short and simple to allow a wider audience of users, this one included, to fit it into their post. By doing this, five characters were saved. Another abbreviation can be seen near the end of the tweet with ‘because’ being abbreviated down to “bc”. By keeping the main plosive and fricative sounds the word can still be easily inferred by the reader. This tweet is not even close to hitting the character limit yet still contains many techniques which shorten the number of characters used. I think that this is a result of tweeting regularly and frequently coming close to hitting the character limit and that the user has become so used to having to save characters that she now automatically changes her language in this way regardless of how many characters she has left. Total characters: 77

Tweet H, Thomas Rotherham College’s English Department. I expected this to follow a very prescriptive and formal style and was quite surprised to see their tweet, Tweet H, open with an abbreviation of ‘literature’, “lit”. This was obviously aimed at the literature students who would be used to hearing it abbreviated to this in spoken language by themselves and members of staff. It also saves a quite substantial seven characters which are used to advertise the podcast. I was surprised at the use of the suffix “local-ish” as this is quite informal and not at all what I was 8

expecting from a professional account since I thought they would be trying to keep a formal tone. However, English teachers are descriptivist in their attitude to the language therefore, it would make sense for them to keep up with the changing language and allow them to communicate with their pupils in a more casual common tone. Total characters: 112 + 22 (for link)

Tweet I and J, Thomas Rotherham College’s official main account. I again expected this account to retain an overall formal tone since it is part of an educational establishment but the tweets appear to all be quite informal and quite targeted to their teenage audience. Tweet I, opened with intitialism “TRC” to avoid using up a good deal of characters with the full name of the college, ‘Thomas Rotherham College’, something the students who follow the account would already be aware of due to members resources. The tweet then goes on to mention the dates the goal scheme trials will be held “12 and 19 of march”. I was surprised to see that the ‘th’ had been left off of the dates as this appears quite informal and is definitely not something I expected to see from a professional account. However, lexemes are often omitted within notices to make them more concise. The discourse of this tweet was affected as the author created an elliptical sentence by missing out a few words in order to include the follow up details. I think that the two words ‘If [you have] expressed an interest’ were left out because the character limit wouldn’t allow the important information to fit into the Tweet, however, it is still easy to understand the users meaning without those words.

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Total characters: 140

The second tweet I analysed from this account was very informal and seemed to be tailored to its audience quite well by converging the language used to make it more relatable for its audience. It opened with an eye catching rhetorical question, but was again missing the verb and personal pronoun ‘have you’ from the beginning of the sentence. This saved nine characters and the sentence is still functional however it is non-standard. The user also shortened ‘congratulations’ down to “congrats”, this reinforces the informal tone and saves another seven letters. By making the phrase so informal it can take away some of the emotion it was intended to evoke but this was rectified but inserting an exclamation mark on the end “congrats!”. This simple addition of punctuation adds the tone back into the tweet and negates some of the effect that the character limit had. The author of this tweet used downward convergence [ CITATION How91 \l 2057 ] to make the post more relatable to its teenage audience who use language more casually. They also used synthetic personalisation with the edited out “you” in “have you been invited” and “use #ucas track to let them know if you’re going”. This again makes the tweet more relatable and increases the authors chance of success as the initial ‘you’ is automatically inserted as you read. Total characters 99 + 22 (for link)

The final company I looked at was The Sword Dancer pub based in Sheffield. I expected this to be quite informal as their audience would a typical family in the local area so they would want to appear friendly, chatty and welcoming. The tweet opens with an informal rhetorical question trying to entice the reader into coming into the restaurant. It is followed by an informal opinion about one of the new items on the menu “How right is the donut burger tho it should be so wrong?”. This tweet shows how orthography has been affected as it contains a deliberate misspelling of ‘though’ so that they can fit the full sentence into the tweet. This makes it appear very informal and unprofessional and is something which probably wouldn’t be acceptable on another social media platform that does not have a character limit. Total characters: 119

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CONCLUSION Overall it seems that the 140/160 character limit does have an effect on the way is users communicate. They frequently shorten and abbreviate words, miss out punctuation and use incorrect grammar so that they can fit more words into a post. However, some of these errors can be attributed to the casual approach most people, especially the younger generations, have towards the ‘rules’ of the English language. These language changes are non-standard but it is still very easy to understand the writers meaning as a great deal of these changes are common in spoken English language, something most users on Twitter are familiar with.

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EVALUATION I would have liked to have more data to input so I would get clearer results that are more definite but I found acquiring users’ permission from professional accounts was especially difficult as they receive many messages daily and do not always reply. If I were to conduct this research again, I would try to have a larger, but equal number of professional and personal accounts so that the results would be easier to compare.

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APPENDICES Tweet A (Personal account - Jessica Charnock, 19, f, Rotherham)

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Tweet B (Personal account - Imogen Pattinson, 21, f, Middlesbrough)

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Tweet C (Personal account – Chloe Jessop, 21, f, Sheffield) 15

Tweet D (Personal account - Becky Downs, 19, f, Rotherham) 16

Tweet E (Personal account - Emma Lycett, 18,f, Sheffield)

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Tweet F (Personal private account – Jessica Charnock, 19, f, Rotherham)

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Tweet G (Personal account - Joanne Walker, 47, f, Dronfield)

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Tweet H (Professional account - Thomas Rotherham College English department)

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Tweet I (Professional account - Thomas Rotherham College)

Tweet J (Professional account - Thomas Rotherham College)

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Tweet K (Professional account – The Sword Dancer Pub)

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Charnock, Jessica Helen. “You know you spent too much time with your mum when you’re sat at Uni listening to @takethat @JulieTTandParty.” Twitter. Twitter, 02 Feb, 2016. Web. https://twitter.com/jessicahelen_/status/694502989403406336 Pattinson, Imogen. “I lurve my new suspender tights! Absolutely beaut and definitely good for showing my thigh tattoo!...Http://t.co/YsgAizUULI.” Twitter. Twitter, 08 Feb. 2015. Web. https://twitter.com/immlaaarr/status/564480858804211712 Jessop, Chloe. “Just arrived in Coventry C’mon @steelershocky lets get a win for Tommo #loudandproud #orangeandproud #letsgosteelers.” Twitter. Twitter, 12 Sept. 2015. Web. https://twitter.com/chloecowen94/status/6427376929601920 Downs, Becky. “Seriously, I don’t want college, I want sleep and to be cost and warm yano.” Twitter. Twitter, 20 Jan 2016. Web. https://twitter.com/BeckyThePatient/status/689710561601392641 Lycett, Emma. “Y’all just mad cause they catch you doing something illegal like doing drugs or drinking underage or speeding smh.” Twitter. Twitter, 1 Mar. 2015. Web. https://twitter.com/forceofstorms Charnock, Jessica Helen. “looked p terrible today but #picslip anyway bc I haven’t done many recently.” Twitter. Twitter, 1 Mar. 2016. Web. https://twitter.com/scarsnevershown Walker, Joanne. “WCS do Cleethorpes inc. Rapha womens 100.” Twitter. Twitter, 23 Jul. 2014. Web. https://twitter.com/joannewalker69 TRCEnglish. “lit students – podcast featuring a fantastic local-ish poet (Derbyshire/sheffield), helen mort. highly recommended.” Twitter. Twitter, 10 Dec. 2015. Web. https://twitter.com/trc_english TRC. “TRC GOAL SCHEME Trials held Saturday 12 and 19 March from 9.30 – 12pm. If expressed and interest you will be contacted to confirm attendance.” Twitter. Twitter, Feb 18. 2016. Web. https://twitter.com/ThomRothCol TRC. “Been invited to a uni interview? Congrats! Use #U...