Lexical Variations at Social Media Platforms: A Comparative Study of Pakistani and British English

Abstract

Social media has increased the lexical variation which is the indicator of the local and global influence on online communication. This study intends to identify the lexical variations at social media platforms in relation to the lexis chosen belongs to either American or British variety of English. Pakistan has always been a site of variable use of different languages i.e. national and international as well. Present study has discussed the various tendencies in the lexical choices of the people who use English language in Pakistan and the United Kingdom in the virtual worlds. The quantitative frequency analysis and qualitative thematic analysis have been used to analyze simulated yet realistic social media data by a mixed-method design. The most frequent lexical variations are to be identified and the social, contextual and cultural conditions involved in the influence of such linguistic choices should be investigated. The findings reveal that the lexical borrowing, hybridization, and code switching is prevalent among the speakers of Pakistani English whose utterances are made with the usage of Urdu and Arabic words to reflect the sense of identity and emotion. The British English speakers on the other hand are more informal and colloquial with slangs, shortening of words and spelling variations which depict informality and localism. The research has identified the lexical difference in social media talk is socially contextual, identity based and situation specific. The present study may provide a fair foundation for the future studies on digitalization of languages and its effects on vocabulary selection in different settings.