Social media may lead to demise of apostrophe, suggest researchers

In recent years, social media has found numerous takers. The situation is such that almost everybody is on social media.

Sharing thoughts or commenting on any issue is part of an everyday affair for several people. In these messages, the character limit on the posts at online platforms, such as Twitter, seems to have been playing a dampener as it is leading to the habit of dropping punctuation from the text.

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Some forms of punctuation may go out of fashion in some time due to this issue. The researchers feel the same and have suggested that the apostrophe may die out because of the problem of sloppy grammar on social media.

The study was carried out on how speech and writing has evolved since the spread of technology in the 1990s.

The researchers looked at over 100 million words to analyse the trends. They found that casual and ungrammatical language has become more prevalent in 30 years.

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Dr Vaclav Brezina of Lancaster University, who led the study, said, "We have experienced dramatic changes in technology, which transformed the way we communicate.”

The study looked at British English in blogs, fiction, newspapers, TV shows and academic writing.

(With inputs from agencies)