Effects Of Whatsapp In The English Language

Are you using WhatsApp? Of course, you are. This is the age of social networking. People use WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, hike and other social media sites in their daily life. Nowadays, every person that I know, it may be my teen cousin or my grandparents, have their own mobile phone and the most used app on their phone is WhatsApp.

I was forwarded this picture in WhatsApp the day before yesterday. My friend thought it funny and passed it onto me. But it instead of making me laugh it made me think. As you can see it is a conversation between a girl and a boy. The girl uses emojies to reply to whatever questions the boy asks and when she finally types in English, it’s absurd. She can’t even type a proper sentence. Why is that? Is it because she doesn’t know English very well or is she forgetting what she learnt because of the constant emojies she uses? This picture made me think and I started to analyze my friends for the past two days. All of my friends either use emoji or symbols, or numbers or in the rare case the use words they spell it wrong.

This forwarded message made me wonder what would happen to the English language if we keep on using it. Let’s be frank. How many of you have texted your friend or cousin in the social media platform in either your mother tongue while mixing it with the English language? Most would just use the shortest method to type a sentence. A simple sentence like, “What are you doing” now became “what doing”. Did you think that this type of improper use of English is only limited to chatting? Well, if you have thought so, then you are absolutely wrong. I happened to see an assignment my neighbor submitted for her school project. I spotted that she had used the word “ur” instead of “your” in a few places. I was shell shocked to see that. A girl of age 15 doesn’t know that the spelling of the word “your”.

I then found a journal online regarding the same topic. “The effects of using WhatsApp messages in the English language” by Mr Om P. Joshi. He did some research and has found that most people use emoticons, symbols or emojies, rather than full sentences with correct spelling. I wish the people would stop for a second and think. Think about how WhatsApp affects the English language.