IMPACT OF SOCIAL MEDIA LANGUAGE USE ON THE WRITTEN ENGLISH OF UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS IN FEDERAL UNIVERSITY WUKARI
This study examines the impact of social media language use on the written English of undergraduate students in the Faculty of Humanities, Federal University Wukari. The study is grounded in Albert Bandura's Social Learning Theory, which explains how individuals acquire language behaviors through observation, retention, reproduction, and motivation within their environment. The problem addressed is that social media communication, characterized by abbreviations, slang, code-mixing, and non-standard spellings, may negatively influence students' academic writing. The study aims to identify the common linguistic features in students' social media communication and determine how these features influence their written English in formal academic contexts. Using a corpus-based approach, a purposive sample of 20 second-year students from four departments was selected. Data were collected from authentic texts generated by students from their social media interactions on WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, and Telegram. The qualitative analysis identified and described recurring linguistic features including abbreviations (u, 2day, pls), code-mixing with Nigerian Pidgin (dey, abeg, no go), grammatical deviations (I go send, ache me die), and non-standard spellings. The findings reveal that these linguistic features are pervasive in students' online communication and frequently transfer into their academic writing, affecting spelling accuracy, grammatical correctness, and formality. The study concludes that social media significantly shapes students' language habits through repeated exposure and social reinforcement of informal patterns. In view of these findings, the study recommends implementing language awareness programs, strengthening standard writing instruction, integrating digital literacy into the curriculum, increasing formal writing practice, and conducting campus-wide awareness campaigns to help students distinguish between informal digital communication and formal academic writing.
Keywords: Social media, Language, Written English, Academic writing, Abbreviations, Codemixing.