The Consequences of Social Media Use on the Orthography of Young Native Speakers of Modern Greek.
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2020-07-03
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en
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Today, an increasing number of people are continuously occupied with mobile devices in their hands, totally focused on the use of social media. This research aims to explore the participation in social media networks and chatting applications as well as the spelling performance of teenagers (13-19 years old) and young adults (20-30 years old). The relevance of this research is that previous studies have studied the impact of social media use on literacy with languages based on Latin script. The focus of the present study is on Greek, a language with a script originating in Phoenicia. The study seeks to explore the effect of social media use, identifying specific social media network sites and chat applications chosen by the participants, as well as how much time they spend on these platforms. This study also seeks to determine participants’ perceptions about and usage of the hybrid language of Greeklish—a combination of Greek and English— in digital communication. This study contains a self-report of participants’ language competency in the Greek language and the effects of social media usage and Greeklish on participants’ orthography skills. The study employs the use of questionnaires to extract information about participants’ social media usage as well as to measure spelling skills via two spelling tasks in Greek. Participants were divided into two groups, defined by age: Group 1 included teenagers, and Group 2 included young adults. The findings revealed that young adults scored higher than teenagers on spelling tasks, and these young adults tend to participate less in or have a more negative attitude toward social media than teenagers. Another crucial finding is that participants who spend more time on social networking sites reveal a lower performance on the spelling tasks. Moreover, increased social media participation correlates with an increased usage of or a positive attitude toward Greeklish. The initial research question was partly confirmed, since age and the use of social media platforms, but not Greeklish, affected spelling skills. The contribution of this study is of interest to Greek society and language institutes and will be novel for languages based on different scripts than Latin.
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