Syntactic Innovation in Gen Z WhatsApp Messages: A Corpus-Based Study

Abstract

English language has always been changing. Since the inception of social media, this change process has escalated to a great deal. Not only do we see a change in digitally developed social media but also in the users’ generation. There has been a considerable difference between Millennials and Generation Z. This difference becomes quite obvious when we probe into their digital writings. This corpus-based study unfolds the syntactical patterns used by Gen Z on their WhatsApp communication. 10.000 messages were selected from WhatsApp chat of Gen Z university students. Python was used for data extraction, cleaning, annotating and compiling a text file of the data. Syntactic structures were analysed under the annotated categories: Subject Drop, Auxiliary Omission, Subject Drop, Bilingual Syntax, Interrogative Flattening, Clause Compression and Determiner Deletion. Further Sketch Engine was used to find frequency, collocation, concordance and n-gram analysis to see which pattern dominated Gen Z communication in their WhatsApp discourse. The results showed that Gen Z WhatsApp communication considerable deviates from traditional English and innovative patterns occupy comprehensive part of their communication. This may not be called a non-standard use of English, rather it is innovative use of English language by a new generation different from the Millennials in their writing patterns.