Social Media and Dialect

"Where are you from?"

"England is my city."

"Litty!" 

This was a conversation that I had overheard one day on a tour of the town of Dubrovnik, Croatia. When I first heard it my immediate reaction was a cringing of sorts, but not for the reason that a person who lacked interest in social media would; I didn't cringe at the person's ignorance of geography and proper wording. Instead, I cringed at the mere reference to Jake Paul (we all know that the vlog squad was the real gems that came out of Vine anyways).  However after a few days of reflection, what really stirred my thoughts was the fact that in this circumstance a non-native English speaker completely understood the consensus of this viral in-joke, "meme" if you will, that an English person made. The world is becoming susceptible to the international dialect that has come along with social media. 

Looking back on history, dialects occur predominantly due to geographical location, and for the most part, specific in-jokes and slang that occur within distinct dialects tend to go over the heads of those who didn't share the same dialect. This is no longer the case.
Through social media applications and websites such as Tumblr, Vine, YouTube, twitter, Instagram, etc. people all over the world have been developing slang terms that are used and understood globally. I first began noticing these things in early 2014 when the Vine app was at it's prime and therefore so were slang words and catch phrases such as:

"Do it for the vine."

"Hit the Quan."

"Zaymmm.."

These social media outlets have developed so far and have been able to access countries worldwide to the extent that a so called "social media dialect" has been developed. Using these terms with majorly any millennial and/or anyone from generation Z internationally that has had access to these social media apps would allow you to understand the extent by which this dialect has developed and unified these generations. Recently, a degree in Memes has surfaced which also makes it possible to comprehend these extents. 

And I would like to end this blog post off by saying, "Bye, Felicia!"