Technology has been the driving factor in how we communicate in todays society… although some may argue for the worse. It’s now the norm to communicate within 140 characters, memes and an angry cat which have all transformed how we talk online.
To understand how we talk online Brandwatch have conducted research into how social media is helping drive evolution in the English language.
Twitter users are the least literate of the internet users looked at, with 0.56% of words on the network being either misspelled or otherwise unofficial, perhaps due to its stricter character limit.
- Twitter: 0.56% or 1 in 179
- Google+: 0.42% or 1 in 238
- Facebook: 0.31% or 1 in 323
- Forums: 0.18% or 1 in 556
Americans trend to deviate more than those based in the UK, with Brits at 0.53% and the USA at the global average of 0.56%. Interestingly, tweeters have been getting increasingly literate over the past few years, getting 0.01% more literate each year since 2011. Although this is probably as a result of increased adoption of auto-correcting devices.
Females are more deviate too, using slang in every 169 words, whereas males once every 192. The most common words used by women are ‘sooo’, ‘loool’ along with ‘awww’ and ‘ohh’. Whereas men prefer to shorten their words such as ‘wanna’ and ‘kinda’.
It comes as no surprise that the most frequent deviation was the usage of acronyms, resulting in words like im, hes and theres. The second most frequent deviation was the use of acronyms. The widest used was LOL, followed by WTF, LMAO, YOLO, OMG and FFS.
We found out plenty of other interesting statistics, which you can discover in this infographic, put together by mycleveragency.
Source: Social Media Today
