Age-Related Variation in Computer-Mediated Communication
A Comparative Analysis of Facebook Status Updates among Female Users in Pakistan
Keywords:
Computer-Mediated Communication, Facebook, language variation, apparent-time analysis, digital discourse, sociolinguisticsAbstract
The introduction of Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) has created new ways of communicating daily, and has resulted in the advent of some novel linguistic practices in online situations. Though previous studies have established linguistic variations in digital communication from various contexts, comparatively little is known about how age varies in online language use among Pakistani Facebook users. It focuses on the apparent-time perspective on two age groups of female Facebook status writers (ages 18-20 and 30-35) to explore the distribution of certain linguistic features in their status updates. In this study, the qualitative comparative content-analysis design was used. The status updates that were reviewed were purposively selected, with 200 being reviewed and analyzed from each one of the participants. Analyses carried out in the study were on the basis of the following five linguistic categories – shortened lexical forms, acronyms, omission of vowels, emoticons/emoji and substitutions of numeric forms. These features were subsequently compared descriptively in terms of their frequency and distribution between the age groups included. The analysis shows that the younger participants generally preferred more innovative linguistic forms than the adult participants, while the adult participants generally preferred a more traditional lexical and orthographic form. These observations suggest variation in the linguistic practice of the selected dataset with respect to age rather than evidence for ongoing language change. The study aids the Computer-Mediated Communication research in Pakistan by reporting the language variations of Facebook users and can serve as the basis for future studies that use longitudinal or larger and more varied data sets to investigate the changes in language throughout time.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Inaya Sehar, Tahira Kanwal, Nosheen Sehar (Author)
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