Universidad Autnoma de Nuevo Len Facultad de

Filosofa y Letras

Introduction to linguistics

Final project: Internet Slangs.

Maestro(a):

Irma Esparza Moreno

Alumno(a): Alejandro Esparza Rodrguez

Gabriela Narvez Fuentes

Liliana Sols Coronado

, 27 de noviembre de 2014

Index
1. INTRODUCTION..........................3
2. TOPIC4

3. PROBLEM APPROACH
4

4. OBJECTIVES.4
5. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK..5-14
Pragmatics..5-7
Semantics7-8
Sociolinguistics..8-10
Social networks..1011
Facebook..1112
Metropolitan Zone of Monterrey.1314

6. INVESTIGATION METHOD1417
Ethnographic Method.1415
Previous study: Internet Slang1617

7. DATA ANALYSIS..1835
8. CONCLUSIONS36
9. BIBLIOGRAPHY.3
7
10.

ATTACHMENTS

Introduction
Nowadays, we live in a world of technology and fast communication. We, as humans,
find in the internet a lot of new expressions that help us to interchange our ideas more
easily. Social networks, like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and others, the most
important ways to generate conversations, are full of Internet Slangs. And, what are
internet slangs?
First of all, we need to talk about the word slang. Almost everyone uses a slang
sometimes, but it is not easy to talk about the definition of this word. Slang has been
defined as one of those things that everybody can recognize but nobody can define (P.
Roberts, 1958, Understanding English, New York: Harper & Row, p. 342)
The use of slang, or colloquial language, introduces many new words into the language
by recombining old words into new meanings. (Victoria Fromkin, 2003, An Introduction
to Language, 7th Edition, Wadsworth Inc Fulfillment, p. 473)
Words like frenemy, Emo, busted, my bad, among others, are examples of slangs
that people are including into their vocabulary and with daily use they become normal
words and they are even being added in dictionaries.
So, Internet slangs are words that we use on social networks and are familiar to every
user, even though not everyone knows that words like OMG, LOL, ILY, LMFAO YOLO,
among others, are slangs.
Sometimes slangs are used to facilitate the writing, making it easier or quicker. Other
uses are for trend, for otiosity or for informality in funny conversations.
In this project, we are going to analyze the use of some internet slang words in the
context of teenagers on Facebook, in the Metropolitan Area of Monterrey.

Topic:
Internet Slang (Shortened language)

Problem approach:
Uses, meanings in base of the context and applications of the abbreviations: LOL,
OMG, ILY, IDK, WTF; in the social network of Facebook within the community of
teenagers between 15 and 20 years who habit on the metropolitan zone of Nuevo Len.

Objectives:

To get to know the influence that these abbreviations have in the actual language
of teenagers inside social networks.

To identify the reasons why the use of these abbreviations expanded.

To discover the uses and applications that these abbreviations in the social
network of Facebook.

Prior to explaining our investigation project, we need to define some concepts for the
better understanding of the whole text. First, lets enumerate the topics we need to talk
about and expand before we get to our contribution:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.

Pragmatics
Semantics
Sociolinguistics
Social networks
Facebook
Metropolitan zone of Monterrey
Ethnographic method

Pragmatics
To begin explaining the concepts regarding our project, we are going to offer a general
background for Pragmatics.
For the past 20-something years, the world has seen a major growth in its interest about
pragmatic problems and pragmatics in general. They say that it has come into its own,
and it is here to stay. But, as it is obvious, even if we take into account this enormous
growth, it is very clear that pragmatics didnt just appear out of nowhere, so, therefore,
we should ask ourselves: how did pragmatics expand so fast?
If we answer this question, well get a first approximation to a better understanding of
what pragmatics is, leading us to a tentative definition of it. And we say tentative
because we still need to add the part of what pragmatics does; even if its not that easy
to limit the field in a way that we can say where pragmatics begin and stop.
The first actions to establish something like a pragmatic approach to linguistics date
back to the late sixties and early seventies. What we can see there is the collapse of
earlier theories and hypotheses, transforming into something new. Slowly and with
intermittent success, a new model saw the light: pragmatics was in the making, even
though initially its practitioners were not even aware of this themselves.
Of course, a development as necessary as this can only be established if we put
ourselves in a historical sight that allows us to observe how the old paradigm needed to
be attacked, changed and adapted so it could leave place for a new paradigm growing
6

and coming to be. At the time, all that was to be seen were unexplained observations,
helping to rise numerous theoretical paradoxes. Knowing this, we could think that the
first group to notice this phenomenon would be the linguists, but thats not the case.
Philosophers were the ones who noticed first, because they were working on
investigations about the gray zone where philosophy and linguistics share a border.
Then, some linguists also noticed some of these observations, not all of them though,
just the ones related to their work on trying to overstep the narrow boundaries of syntax
and semantics.
The pragmatic turn that took place in linguistics can be described as a shift from the
paradigm of theoretical grammar to the paradigm of the language user.
We owe the modern use of the term pragmatics to the philosopher named Charles
Morris. His definition of the concept is that pragmatics are the study of the relations of
signs to interpreters.
However, even though this man is considered like the father of pragmatics, his definition
is not entirely accurate, but, to be fair, no definition ever is wholly satisfactory, because
defining means to impose and end or a boundary, and we cannot do that to pragmatics
due to the fact that it is in constant development, and those boundaries would have to
be moved all the time. Nevertheless, for the purpose of this project, we are going to
stick with this definition:
Pragmatics studies the use of language in human communication as determined by the
conditions of society.
From this definition, we can deduct that pragmatics has potential application to all fields
with a stake in how words are understood. Anyhow, there are four particular areas that
seem to be specially promising in the field of problems in communication: so-called
applied linguistics, the study of man-machine interaction, the study of communicational
difficulties in face-to-face interaction and the study of communicational difficulties that
arise when communicators are not in face-to-face interaction.

Applying the topic to the particular case were studying, we focus on the last area:
communicational difficulties when there is no face-to-face interaction, because were
examining it on the Facebook social network area, which well explain later.

Semantics
Semantics is a part of linguistics because we use it to refer to the study of meaning, and
meaning is a part of language, thus, a part of linguistics. The word semantics as a
term has been added to the English language not so long ago. One of the earliest books
on linguistics to ever treat the term semantics as the science of meaning was
Semantics: studies in the science of meaning by M. Bral in 1900, but the original
French version was released three years earlier. In addition to this, it also was not
mainly interested with changes of meaning from a historical point of view. Nonetheless,
the expression semantics wasnt well known for some time; even when referring to it
on numerous books of the past, they used complicated explanations or invented various
designations to it, instead of addressing it as semantics.
Now that we know that semantics study meaning, it is obvious that we need to learn
what the term meaning is; it is, of course, a much more familiar expression to us, but
well be looking for definitions that come close to the use we need in semantics.
First of all, we shall establish that, for our purposes, in any sense, there is no link
between the terms mean or meaning as the verb intend denotes.
Coming closer to the sense we need, were going to indicate two examples:
1. That cloud means thunder.
2. A red light means stop.
In both this cases, means is used for signs, whether they are natural or conventional,
that indicate something. However, there is a disparity between these two sentences.
The one about the traffic lights belongs to a communication system in which each color
has been given a meaning (Green=Go, Red=Stop, Amber=Precaution) for society, while
the clouds do not have a conventional given meaning, they dont belong to any system,
they still provide us with some kind of information, but they do not entirely communicate.

Even these examples are not enough to show the use we need, because the most
accurate one (traffic lights) is derived from language, and, moreover, from a limited and
specialized use of it.
Now, for the purpose we need, the most relevant way to use the term is the one with the
form of What does (something) mean?; being the answer to that question:
(Something) means (definition). This kind of answer to such type of questions is said
in other words that the speaker thinks the hearer can understand. We can typically
observe this characteristic on dictionaries. As we all know, dictionaries provide
definitions by stating words or phrases which have the same meaning; we translate
from obscure terms, technical terms, or a foreign language into words that can be easily
understood by us.
Thats how we are going to use the concept of meaning, but not only analyzing the
real definition of words, but studying the meaning people invent or provide for them,
depending on the context.

Sociolinguistics
This term can refer to many things, but the one explanation we can use is the reference
to correlations between languages and society, and also between particular linguistic
and social phenomena.
The term sociolinguistics as it is, was coined in the 1950s to try to bring together the
perspectives of linguistics and sociologists to bear on issues concerning the place of
language in society, and to address, in particular, the social context of linguistic diversity.
Sociolinguistics has close connections with the social sciences, like sociology,
anthropology, psychology in the social field, and education, to give some examples.
This science involves studies of multilingualism, social dialects, conversational
interaction, attitudes to language, language change, and many others. It is impossible to
put our fingers on every single different approach to the topic, as there are endless
possibilities on what phenomena to study, even more because there are multiple
languages, alive languages that change and adapt to the times, places, ages, genre,
and so on.
9

Nowadays, modern sociolinguistics can be divided into two major groups:

1. Theoretical: It is concerned with formal models and methods for analyzing the
structure of speech communities and speech varieties, and providing a general
account of communicative sentence.
2. Applied: It deals with the social and political implications of fundamental
inequalities in language use in various areas of public life, for example, schools.
Now, talking about our topic, the group which fits us just right is the theoretical one,
because were analyzing one specific phenomenon of language, like a speech variety,
but were not stating that this event is wrong or should be changed, plus it doesnt have
any political or fundamental social implications; were just analyzing it and providing a
breakdown about it.
Thus, in our aspect, we kind of present sociolinguistics as a series of unconnected
topics because there is no common theoretical framework within which to link them,
because the phenomena are too specific and have to be analyzed separately and in a
specialized manner.
Another form of defining sociolinguistics is calling it language in society, and even
though this may not seem very important, it really is. Why not call it language and
society? It is done in purpose to emphasize the fact that the study of society must
accord a place to language within it at the same time as the study of language must
take account of society. Sociolinguistics can help us understand why we speak
differently in various social contexts, and help uncover the social relationships in a
community. For example, you probably wouldn't speak the same to your boss at work as
you would your friends, or speak to strangers as you would to your family.

Sociolinguistics may also wonder whether women and men speak the same as each
other. Or why do people the same age or from the same social class or same ethnicity
use similar language? Sociolinguistics attempts to explain all these questions and more.
Ultimately, sociolinguistics is everywhere!

10

It has become an increasingly important and popular field of study, as certain cultures
around the world expand their communication base and intergroup and interpersonal
relations take on escalating significance. The ways in which language reflects behavior
can often be complex and subtle. This is why sociolinguistics has to be a specialized
study and deep analysis of social occurrences on daily life.

Social networks
Next, we have to explain what social networks are, how they work and some examples
of them. You may think: Why is that relevant to the project? Well, its because the
context we chose to work on is precisely that one: social networks. Well, to be more
specific, one in particular: Facebook (well come to this one later).
Since their introduction, social network sites have attracted millions of users, many of
whom have integrated these sites into their daily routines. Most sites support the
maintenance of pre-existing social networks, but others help strangers connect based
on shared interests, political views or activities. Some sites cater to diverse audiences,
while others attract people based on common language or shared racial, sexual,
religious, or nationality based identities. Sites also vary in the extent to which they
incorporate new information and communication tools, such as mobile connectivity,
blogging, and photo/video- sharing.
We define social network sites as web-based services that allow individuals to:
1. Construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system.
2. Articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection.
3. View and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the
system.
The nature and nomenclature of these connections may vary from site to site.
The most popular social network sites up to this day are these 15, with their average
monthly visitors:
1.
2.
3.
4.

Facebook-900,000,000
Twitter-310,000,000
LinkedIn-255,000,000
Pinterest-250,000,000
11

5. Google Plus-120,000,000
6. Tumblr-110,000,000
7. Instagram-100,000,000
8. VK-80,000,000
9. Flickr-65,000,000
10. Vine-42,000,000
11. Meetup-40,000,000
12. Tagged-38,000,000
13. Ask.fm-37,000,000
14. MeetMe-15,500,000
15. ClassMates-15,000,000
Having given some examples, the one we are going to explain further and focus on, is
Facebook.

Facebook
Facebook is a popular free social networking website that allows registered users to
create profiles, upload photos and video, send messages and keep in touch with
friends, family and colleagues. The site, which is available in 37 different languages,
includes public features such as:

Marketplace - allows members to post, read and respond to classified ads.

Groups - allows members who have common interests to find each other and

interact.
Events - allows members to publicize an event, invite guests and track who

plans to attend.
Pages - allows members to create and promote a public page built around a

specific topic.
Presence technology - allows members to see which contacts are online and
chat.

Within each member's personal profile, there are several key networking components.
The most popular is arguably the Wall, which is essentially a virtual bulletin board.
Messages left on a member's Wall can be text, video or photos. Another popular
component is the virtual Photo Album. Photos can be uploaded from the desktop or
directly from a smartphone camera. There is no limitation on quantity, but Facebook
staff will remove inappropriate or copyrighted images. An interactive album feature
12

allows the member's contacts (who are called generically called "friends") to comment
on each other's photos and identify (tag) people in the photos. Another popular profile
component is status updates, a microblogging feature that allows members to broadcast
short Twitter-like announcements to their friends. All interactions are published in a
news feed, which is distributed in real-time to the member's friends.
Facebook offers a range of privacy options to its members. A member can make all his
communications visible to everyone, he can block specific connections or he can keep
all his communications private. Members can choose whether or not to be searchable,
decide which parts of their profile are public, decide what not to put in their news feed
and determine exactly who can see their posts. For those members who wish to use
Facebook to communicate privately, there is a message feature, which closely
resembles email.
In May 2007, Facebook opened up its developers' platform to allow third-party
developers to build applications and widgets that, once approved, could be distributed
through the Facebook community. In May 2008, Facebook engineers announced
Facebook Connect, a cross-site initiative that allows users to publish interactions on
third-party partner sites in their Facebook news feed.

Metropolitan zone of Monterrey

Now that we have explained in general terms the concepts concerning our project, we
need to establish the area where the study is going to be conducted. Our sample area is
the Metropolitan Zone of Monterrey. The Monterrey metropolitan area refers to the
surrounding urban agglomeration of Monterrey, Nuevo Leon. Officially called Area
Metropolitana de la Ciudad de Monterrey or AMM, the metropolitan area is the 3rdlargest such area in Mexico.
The Monterrey metropolitan area is composed of the municipalities/cities of:

Apodaca
13

Cadereyta Jimnez
Escobedo
Garca
Guadalupe
Jurez
Monterrey
Salinas Victoria
San Nicols de los Garza
San Pedro Garza Garca
Santa Catarina
Santiago

These are, so to speak, the official cities that compose this metropolitan area, but we
did some thinking and came to the conclusion that a study of all these would be really
extensive and we wouldnt finish on time with the quality we wish for; thus, we decided
to choose just some of them, 5 of them to be specific. Those cities are:

Monterrey
Apodaca
Escobedo
Guadalupe
San Nicols de los Garza

You may be asking yourself: What was the criteria for choosing these 5? Was it
random? The answer is no, it isnt random at all. Our criteria was actually pretty simple
and easy to understand. First of all, we took into account the proximity of them to the
city of Monterrey, those are the ones that are most near. But, proximity is not the only
factor, because, as you may have noticed, we chose to ignore some near cities, why is
that? Because the second factor we analyzed is the economic development of the
cities, and these are the ones which are most developed in this area, with the exception
of San Pedro, the rest are under-developed, so to speak. We chose to leave them out
because of these reasons, and, regarding San Pedro, its because of the opposite
reasons, it is a city that is much more rich and developed that it doesnt fit on the
context.

Ethnographic method
14

For the last topic well explain before getting on with our contribution, we are going to
expose the method we thought that fitted the most for our specific research material.
And then justify the logic behind our selection.
The ethnographic method is that most distinctively associated with sociology and
anthropology. It starts from the assumption that human activities are socially organized
and so, from the outset, is committed to inquiring into patterns of interaction and
collaboration. Unlike many other quantitative and qualitative methods in the social
sciences which tend to use more formal instruments of data capture and analysis, the
ethnographic method relies on an observer going into the field and learning the ropes
through questioning, listening, watching, talking, etc., with practitioners.
One obvious consequence of this is that in the first instance, at least, data collected will
be of the 'messy' and unstructured variety, but part of the work we do is precisely
organize the data collected. It may include interviews, observations of work sequences,
anecdotes, speculations, and so on. The data gathered, in other words, usually takes
the form of field notes but is often supplemented by audio and video data. In this case,
we are not going to make use of video or audio, by cause of time.
From this brief description, we can identify some features of ethnographic practice that
are not always well understood by new practitioners:
1. Ethnography is naturalistic: That is, it predicates its inquiries on the principle
that studies should be studies of real people and their activities, operating in their
natural environment, whatever that may be. An important justification of the
approach is that it is not known in advance of inquiry just what the relevant
features of some settings are. As such ethnography refuses to deal with artificial
environments and controlled versions of work, and instead aims to study the
natural environment of work and its activities.
2. Ethnography is prolonged: We should perhaps point out that there is no
logical reason why an ethnography should take a long time. The main reason for
prolongation is that for the most part ethnographers have no clear idea what they
will find. Because there are in principle any number of aspects which may turn

15

out to be interesting, and any number of things which may be mystifying, it will
take time to form a coherent view of what is going on.
3. Ethnographic enquiries seek to elicit the social world from the point of view
of those who inhabit it: Ethnographies can be undertaken for any theoretical,
analytical, or empirical purpose, and as a result ethnography is too diverse a set
of practices to be described as a method.
4. Ethnographic data resists formalization: Ethnography stresses the importance
of 'context' or 'setting', and thus there can be no theoretical perspective which
can explain in advance what one is likely to see in a new setting, nor any data
which constitutes the 'right' data to be collecting.
Considering this general interpretation of the method, we concluded that this is the
best option for us to guide our research. Due to the nature and characteristics of our
investigation, it is a qualitative one, as we use surveys, and wed use interviews if
there was enough time to do so. Second, we take the opinion of people who live the
phenomenon were studying, and we do not try to manipulate in any form the
environment of the surveyed people, instead, we let them operate naturally as they
normally do, and we just keep track of the responses.

Internet Slang
Finally, before getting to our contribution, lets review a little research made for the
University of Princeton by Lindsay Kolowich. First, we must explain in general terms
what slang is and its context (according to the study).
Slang consists of a lexicon of non-standard words and phrases in a given language.
Use of these words and phrases is typically associated with the subversion of a
standard variety (such as Standard English) and is likely to be interpreted by listeners
as implying particular attitudes on the part of the speaker. In some contexts a speaker's
selection of slang words or phrases may convey prestige, indicating group membership
or distinguishing group members from those who are not a part of the group.
Every year, hundreds of new words and phrases that come from internet slang are
added to the dictionary.

16

Some of them are abbreviations, like FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) and YOLO (You
Only Live Once). Others are words that have been stretched into more parts of speech
than originally intended -- like when "trend" became a verb ("It's trending worldwide").
Others still have emerged as we adapt our language to new technologies; think
"crowdfunding," "selfie," "cyberbullying."
You might notice how many of these "new" words are actually just appropriated,
meaning they are pre-existing words that are combined or given entirely new meanings.
For example, "social network" became a word in the Oxford English Dictionary back in
1973, referring to the physical activity of networking in a social atmosphere. In the
1990s, people began using the term to refer to virtual engagement, and that became an
official definition in 1998.
Next, basing on the study, well analyze the way that slang spreads on the Internet,
because thats more or less the context were situated on.
The question of how slang spreads has occupied linguists and anthropologists for
decades. When it comes to the mechanics of new word distribution, it's been tough to
measure with any precision -- that is, until the advent of public social media networks.
Social media networks like Twitter allow linguists a more accurate and easily searchable
record of our exchanges. Jacob Eisenstein and his colleagues at the Georgia Institute of
Technology in Atlanta conducted a study examining 30 million tweets sent from different
locations in the U.S. from December 2009 to May 2011. The purpose of the study was
to pinpoint the origin of popular slang words and track how they spread across the
country.
The resulting map shows how these slang terms migrated across the country, as well as
the direction of that influence:

17

Because of social media, words are moving around the world within weeks and months,
whereas before, it could take a few years, says Julie Coleman, author of The Life of
Slang. "It's not necessarily that language is changing more quickly, but technologies
have developed and they allow the transmission of slang terms to pass from one group
to another much more quickly."

We will present in the next graphics the results of our work about the use of the
expressions OMG, ILY, IDK, WTF, and LOL. The graphics show the numbers of
the people who answered the interviews, the number of people who use these internet
slangs, the people who do not use it and we separated the results of our investigation
in three categories: gender, age and town. Apodaca, Escobedo, Guadalupe, Monterrey
and San Nicols (all city councils of the state of Nuevo Len) are the ones that we took
into account; 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, and 20 years old, because we thought are the ages
when the teens know more about the kind of topic that we are investigating, are the
ages of the people that we interviewed.
18

We, as the authors of our work, are going to analyze every graphic (results of the
interviews questions) and give the explanations according to the results and our little
research about the uses of these abbreviations. The fact of take the three categories to
see more specifically the uses will help us to see if the zone, where the interviewees
live, the age and the gender make more pronounced the uses of OMG, ILY, IDK,
WTF, and LOL.
Before we started our research, we asked our friends about the internet slangs and
they didnt know what they meant and when we asked if they used to write LOL OMG
and WTF (the most used) (just to give an example); they answered that they
sometimes used this expressions in Facebook when they are talking with their
friends, or when they want to talk quickly. This makes us see that it is important that
people know about what they are using, and not only use it just because of their friends
or for trend in social networks.
An interesting doubt that we, and you, as readers, might have at the final of this project
is, if in the future, the peoples writing would change to these slangs or if the people will
take conscience about the importance of writing properly.

19