Lexical and grammatical peculiarities of Facebook communication

الملخص EN

In recent years, the use of internet has significantly changed the way our society connects with one another, as well as some people use it to do their business.

Today’s youth have never known a world without the Internet, which is a piece of information most of people must put into context when they think about and compare, generationally, social networking sites to face-to-face communications or by sending instant messaging.

Social network sites (SNSs) have the ability to substantially change the character of our social lives, whether on an interpersonal and a community level.

Changes in interaction patterns and social connections are already evident among young people, who are the heaviest users of these sites.

Social networking site Facebook has become increasingly popular components of our everyday lives in today’s globalizing society.

It provides a context where people across the world can communicate, exchange messages, share knowledge, and interact with each other regardless of the distance that separates them.

Research has revealed that there is an apparent difference in the way different genders use social networks with different purposes.

In general, females use social networking sites for maintaining existing relationships, while males use it for making new relationships.

They use Facebook mostly for making new friends and relationships while females use it mostly for finding their old friends and keeping in touch with friends either living nearby or in other regions while males are more likely to use social networks to find potential friends and find people with have similar interests.

Gender language in Facebook is characterized by various features (e.g.

initialism, clipping, blending, conversion, acronym, abbreviation, contraction, substitution, nonstandard spelling, letter/ number homophone, phonetic spelling, capitalization, multiple phoneme, emoticon and non-standard use of punctuation.

Also, social networking sites should be studied in terms of different variables such as educational level, profession, cultural differences, etc, while the possible sources of these differences can be studied in an in-depth manner.