LANGUAGE ECONOMY: ABBREVIATIONS AND EMOJI IN SOCIAL MEDIA

Abstract

The pervasive influence of abbreviations and emoji in social media communication is a subject of contemporary analysis, revealing insights into their multifaceted roles and implications. Abbreviations not only foster brevity and readability but also serve as linguistic markers, signaling group membership and reinforcing social identities (Thurlow and Brown 2003). Emoji enrich textual content by imbuing it with affective nuances and contextual cues, facilitating cross-cultural communication and engendering empathy in online interactions (Derks et al. 2008). Individuals navigate an interplay between linguistic and visual cues, utilizing contextual clues to infer meanings. For this qualitative study, a cohort of 15 participants, both English and Macedonian speakers, engaging in a total of 150 conversations across prominent social media platforms and 10 posts with comments on Reddit, formed a corpus for analysis. . Textual data, were collected from diverse platforms including Viber, Reddit, Instagram, Telegram, Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp. The findings show that 1) participants use abbreviations and emoji for the purpose of language economy and the aforementioned enrich language; 2) expressing emotional states on social media is made easier with abbreviations and emoji. We hope this research will encourage other scholars from various discipline to address this topic from different angles.