The language of WhatsApp, a case of students of St. Martin’s senior high school, Adoagyiri-Nsawam

Abstract

The present research adapted Crystal’s (2008) analytical model to investigate the language of WhatsApp used among students of St. Martin’s Senior High School, Adoagyri-Nsawam. Through documentation and semi-structured interviews, the informants who comprised of 35 students with 10 males and 25 females, helped collect 115 chats out of which 100 were sampled for the analysis. The results revealed hybridized language permeated into the linguistic continuum of the students’ mode of WhatsApp chatting, meaning students’ WhatsApp language choice is characterized by informal linguistic features; thus, reactive tokens, paralinguistic and prosodic features, acronyms/initialisms, contractions, clippings, letter/number homophone, punctuations and capitalizations, emoticons/similey, phonetic/misspellings, syntactic reduction, pidgin and code-mixing. Among the features, contractions, clippings and letter/number homophone were the most preferred choice of the students whilst the least popular features were acronyms/initialisms and paralinguistic/prosodic features. The present study is, therefore, significant as it may attract lexicographers and other researchers who wish to undertake related study. Also, the findings may help individuals pursuing courses in English language studies. Finally, it offers both teachers and students a premise of awareness of WhatsApp language and its repercussions when used in a formal setting. Keywords: WhatsApp, Chats, Computer Mediated Communication and Language features