Linguistics of social media: An introduction to the special issue

Abstract

It is hard to remember a world without social media (SM). The Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and bulletin boards of the 1980s and the popular early platforms of the 1990s, MySpace, AOL Messenger, and Facebook, gave rise to nothing short of an SM empire in just 50 years. Although we have been considering how language is used on the Internet for some time now, studying the language used on SM is comparatively a newer field of inquiry.