"Bye Felicia!" - How the Language of the Internet is Waving Goodbye to Traditional English

"Bye Felicia." By definition, this supposedly useful phrase that suggests a farewell to a person named Felicia is actually an expression used to dismiss a person who is irrelevant and annoying, regardless of gender, name or age. You're probably wondering why this has anything to do with a blog post about the language of the internet, however, had I not been logged on to a particular Facebook on a wintry Sunday morning, I would never have come across this now much used phrase. It's not just quirky phrases that young people and teenagers appear to be picking up from the web; it's the whole smorgasbord of non-standard English.

Paul Kerswill, professor of linguistics at Lancaster University, studies street language in London. He has found that young people aren't just using non-standard English to just sound cool or fit in with peers; they're using it when they speak to everyone. He blames this epidemic on the language of the internet and its lack of any grammar and language police, like teachers and parents in the real world, to halt the use of initialisms and abbreviations that are plaguing the English language.

The biggest culprits that instigate the use of non-standard English are social networking sites. Twitter in particular has a strict 140 character per tweet rule which, in order to get one's opinion across, one has to ignore grammar rules in order to fit the message in the allocated space. For example, the hashtag "WhatsInMyBrowserHistory" should have an apostrophe in "What's" but it doesn't. This is also due to another of Twitter's workings; in order for hashtags to work, the block of characters can't have any spaces in them therefore young people are throwing all they knew or didn't know about grammar straight out the window and opting to use this non-standard form.

Granted, some social networkers suffer from recognised disorders hindering their ability to use Standard English. For example, an individual from my Facebook page is a dyslexic and the following comment shows this: "Of to adventure wonderland tmw." However, a person who doesn't know this individual could easily assume that they are being ignorant of any standard grammar that should be used in this instance thus influencing others, especially younger people still in school, to write in this way. On the other hand, internet users may use non-standard English on purpose, as comedian Ellen DeGeneres often does in her tweets – "Check it out-now you can tweet and shop at the same time! I call it twopping. I hope you twop 'till you drop." She's used these neologisms for comedic effect however, as is frequently seen, neologisms that originate on the internet can be easily transferred to day-to-day English, as "Bye Felicia" was.  Linguist David Crystal argues in his book, "Language and the Internet" that "In everyday conversation, terms from the underlying computer technology are given a new application among people who want their talk to have a cool-cutting edge."

Personally, I despise internet language and the use of non-standard English on the web and in everyday conversation so, in conclusion, to that I say, "Bye Felicia."

Sophie Stevens