Language is a vehicle that allows groups and individuals to express their sense of identity and sense of self. The linguistic choices we make reflect our identity and group membership. The growing use of the Internet has changed the way people communicate on social platforms and the way language is used. Within social groups, workplaces and professions, jargon, slang and adolescent language are fundamental to creating and maintaining relationships and belonging to the group. Young people often manipulate their language to suit social groups and, in some cases, to exclude others. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Individuals use language on the Internet to create personalized identities and to communicate with others. The Internet has changed the way language is used, and the way it is used reflects how individuals want to be perceived by their peers and the public. The syntactic structure of written language on social media is indicative of spoken language and includes non-standard grammatical structures. Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram are used by people to express themselves, and posts published on these platforms generally include non-standard grammatical structures. A Tumblr user posted on their page, "I just went on Facebook and," attached a screenshot of what they were referring to. Although this grammatical structure is non-standard and informal, characterized by the lack of punctuation and capitalization, it is a dependent clause and does not interfere with communication between the user and the audience, nor bridge the social distance between them. As people communicate with each other more commonly via digital communication, phrases such as "do you know where it stands" and "applause in advance" are used in the public sphere to speak directly to someone in non-standard posts via social media. Another example of non-standard linguistic features online is the viral "spooderman" meme which features a poorly drawn image of Spiderman captioned with phrases such as "wit graet paowr cums graet sweg" and "yu do dis". The use of this language gives users a creative, playful and fun identity. The constant new Internet language trends, such as abbreviations and acronyms such as "lol" and "wtf", which have been popular for many years. The well-known acronym “ol” is pronounced as an initialism, for “laugh out loud,” making its way into spoken language and easily pronounceable as an acronym. The semantic meanings behind “lol” have changed over time and more recently it has been adopted by teenagers to express sarcasm. Recently, the use of “lol” has become less “trendy” among young people, replaced by “HAHAHA” to indicate when something is funny, even if the laughter does not happen physically. The way people communicate on the Internet allows them to communicate with colleagues and the public, creating an online profile to represent their identity on social media and how they are perceived. Jargon and slang are key indicators of individual and group identities. Their main function is to create group belonging, excluding outsiders. Jargon is the specialized vocabulary of some groups, and this linguistic feature is used by people with common professions or interests to serve as a reinforcement of group identity, with the aim of facilitating communication by excluding outsiders who cannot understand the common language . Lexical features of jargon include abbreviations and acronyms such asin medical jargon, as “peripheral edema” for ankle swelling, “tachycardia” for rapid heartbeat, and “idiopathic” for unknown cause. Although these lexemes make communication between doctors and nurses faster and more specific, they obscure the truth so as not to alarm patients who hear these terms. Colloquialisms and slang terms are elements of the informal vocabulary used among people who belong to socially definable groups. Slang can serve the important function of building relationships in the workplace. In many Australian hospitals, slang terms such as 'vegetables', meaning unresponsive patients, or 'FLK', the acronym used for 'funny looking kid', are used. To patients and outsiders these terms may seem negatively connoted and disrespectful, yet they are important in the jargon of hospital staff as it distances them from the illness and death that surrounds them. Slang can be used to keep outsiders in the dark, for example people involved with illicit drugs use slang terms to maintain secrecy. Examples of these terms include "lemonade" for "poor-quality drugs" and "gym sticks" for steroids used by athletes. Once these terms are discovered by outsiders, they are abandoned and replaced by new lexemes, resulting in a high turnover rate for these slang terms. Kate Burridge states that "[jargon] facilitates communication on the one hand, but on the other it erects barriers to successful communication". group membership and creating social distance from outsiders. The way today's youth use language helps express group belonging and identity. Teenagers' language is seen as a threat to standards from most points of view conservatives and prescriptivists of the older generation However, adolescents constantly manipulate language to suit their communicative needs adolescent language lexicon changes rapidly, and each new term is quickly replaced by newer, more contemporary lexemes. Syntactically, expressions can contain an ellipsis, such as "coming?" instead of "You're coming" or non-standard spellings such as "wot" instead of "what". Although these varieties deviate from the standard, these linguistic features are commonly found in SMS messages between friends and are considered appropriate to the context. Similarly, in conversations, interlocutors unconsciously modify the phonotactic structure of some utterances. This is evident when you assimilate the words “going to” with the more fluid “gonna”, which creates a casual and inviting atmosphere. Additionally, using slang such as “rents” for “parents” in “teen talk” creates group solidarity by adopting terms that teens are familiar with. Another popular abbreviation is the adjective 'povo', derived from the noun 'poverty'. This was popularized by Chris Lilley's TV series “Summer Heights High,” where the private school student character Ja'mie uses this term to describe public school students. The function of this reduction in this case was to exclude the public school group. Discourse markers are also used by young speakers to indicate their solidarity with members of their group or with other people like them. The most common speech marker is “like” which functions as emphasis “I'm not like… Depressed,” softening “Can I borrow your notes?” and finally quoting: "And then he said...". Since the re-enactment of the speech is indicative of an adolescent conversation, the use of the quotative “like” makes the speech more 2019.