A Language Of Social Media

Since the existence of the first human, “The homo sapiens” on the earth. We humans have been thriving to connect with each other. First, we drew some “symbols and pictures” on the wall to convey our thoughts, then we use “sign language” then “various sounds” and ultimately we started putting our words into the sentences, that’s how languages born and became an integral part of our life.

We used languages to express our feelings, be it anger, love, faith, or envy! It allowed us to articulate our thoughts and ideate things more enhanced way. Anyways, we’ve come a long way from that point of time and now we are efficiently using languages in our day to day life.

But hold on! Do you really think we are using our languages as we used to do earlier? I mean just look around on social media, it looks like languages are evolving, taking us back to our roots, from where we started, to the “phase of homo sapiens”. Not getting me? Right? Let me elaborate with one chat transcript,

Boy 1: ssup bruh? Hw u doing? :)

Boy 2: V well! Hws ur wk?

Boy 1: TGIF! Chln WKND.

Boy 2: ‘ll meet 2nite! @ur Place. Its ur BD. BTW HBD in Adv.

Boy 1: WTF! I almost 4Got!

Boy 1: :) JK!

Did you understand anything? Well if you belong to my generation from early 19s, probably you won’t get it but for millennials, it’s a piece of cake! And that’s how my 19 year old’s chat transcript looks like. During initial days while talking with someone, we used to write and speak whole sentences but today’s generation, they’ve shortened whole words. Not only words, but they are abbreviating whole sentences too! Do you know what ICYWW used for? It’s “In case you were wondering”. Strange isn’t it? Even many millennials are now only talking in abbreviated language.

There are few geeks who explain how we started shortening the words. According to them, this became a very common concept since the invention of the mobile device. The initial version of the mobile devices, like “Pager”, had some limitations where you could only send and receive a few words! From then people managed to deliver their message in one single shot by avoiding lengthy texts. Fortunately, we are out of those technical limitations but shortening our text became very handy.

Those geeks who explained this history, they also predict the future. Many of them believe that in coming future even those “shortened words” will go out of the business. How? They believe its “emoji”. Emojis will become very popular and outpace such short words very easily. emoji has the power to become prominent in our day to day languages.

Due to these speculations around emojis, there is now one new term has coined amongst people, “An emoticon”, for those who don’t know what emoticon is, an emoticon is a pictorial form of the facial expressions, which we will use in the future to convey our message, feelings, and thoughts. In near future there won’t be any “lengthy sentences” and won’t be any “short words”, there will be only “emojis”

Now I want you to imagine the whole scenario, when we were Homo sapiens, how we evolved our language! From drawing symbols on the wall to the sign language, then from using sounds, short words, and the final product our “language”. But now our languages are being replaced by “short words” and short words will be replaced soon by “emojis”. If you look closely you will see latter one is happening in a reverse manner, transitioning from a well-spoken language to the primitive cave wall symbols or should I call it emojis? In terms of the evolution of the language,

Don’t you think we are heading back to our roots? From where we started? What would you call it? Evolution or devolution?