HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF ORTHOGRAPHY IN ENGLISH AND IMPACT OF COMPUTER-MEDIATED COMMUNICATION (CMC) ON THE EMERGING ORTHOGRAPHIC PATTERNS IN ENGLISH

Abstract

The current study aims to find out the historical impact on the English orthographic patterns used by Pakistani students in their Facebook 'wall' conversations. Computer-MediatedCommunication (CMC) has emerged as a new genre, the third medium  ecause it is said to incorporate the features of both speech and writing. The growing popularity of CMC has had an impact on English orthography. The orthographic patterns of CMC in use these days have exhibited features of divergence from historical and traditional orthography. This study aims at investigating the patterns of divergence taking place over three years from 2018 to 2020 in CMC and also comparing them with conventional English orthography. Linguistic variability is an evolutionary process which the languages of the world have gone through since their inception. In order to investigate the propositions, language posts (collected on the Facebook wall for 50 university students) were analyzed. The results reveal the emergence of numerous
novel features of orthography emerging in CMC. These findings lead to the conclusion that facebook has played an important role in changing CMC patterns of English orthography. English language is now more integrated into online communication. The findings reveal that there has been significant change exhibiting divergence from traditional English in the orthographic patterns. It is also expected that the future will reveal many novel features of English orthography therefore, the future research will lead to expansion of the current research.