Open AccessTryna b Kewl: Textual Analytics of Distorted Words among Malaysian Millennials on Twitter
Author(s) -
Nur Nashatul Nasuha Nazman,
Kee-Man Chuah,
Su-Hie Ting
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
international journal of innovative technology and exploring engineering
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2278-3075
DOI - 10.35940/ijitee.c7961.019320
Subject(s) - malay , social media , churning , vocabulary , advertising , analytics , psychology , linguistics , computer science , world wide web , business , data science , labour economics , economics , philosophy
The presence of Malaysian millennials on social media platforms is increasingly gaining attention particularly on Twitter. Language wise, many of them are predominantly using English and Malay in their tweets but with a touch of their own “styles” in various morphological aspects. This trend eventually leads to a rampant use of distorted vocabulary, churning out many non-standard words. This study aims to address the need in classifying the types of morphological distortions of words that are widely used among the Malaysian millennials and identify the reasons behind such trend. A total of 50 active Twitter users from Malaysia aged 18 to 30 years old were randomly chosen for this study. From each user, 20 tweets of longer than 5 words were selected for lexical analysis, giving a sum of 1000 tweets (8443 words in total). Then, interviews were conducted on 30 participants to gauge the factors of using those non-standard words. The findings revealed that the words were largely distorted in terms of its inflections so as to fit some sounds. Also, most distorted words were deliberately coined so that the millennials would appear trendy, while some were merely following the usage without knowing the actual word. This study has shown that the use of distorted words among Malaysian Twitter users did not hinder effective communication.