Abstract:
This paper examined the orthography of words used by the National
University of Lesotho undergraduate students on WhatsApp. Although language is
regarded as a coherent and homogeneous system, it can also be studied in its
variations across time and space and how it is actually used in social interaction.
Youth immersion in the use of social media has successfully made the presence of
the digital era to be felt not only in social life but also in communicative
competencies. This paper recognised the youth linguistic creativity as a concept
that characterised nomenclature of spelling conventions observed on social media.
Using voluntary participatory approach, data was collected from undergraduate
students majoring in English at the University who volunteered to share their
WhatsApp posts for the purpose of this study. Data revealed that youths’ social
media discourse featured different orthographic representations as a result of
accent stylisation, substitution, acronym, hybrid, clipping, coalescence,
onomatopoeic spellings and deletions. The paper concluded that youth social media
discourse deviates from conventional spellings, and thus serves as a linguistic
innovation from the part of the youths. It further concluded that social media
discourse is a true reflection of language diversity in this digital era especially with
regards to the language of the youth globally.
