THE MORPHOLOGY AND EFFECT OF SMS/SOCIAL MEDIA HABITUATION ON THE SPELLING PATTERNS OF SOME SECONDARY STUDENTS IN DELTA STATE, NIGERIA

The influence of technology and the internet on modern English language is indisputable. Social media apps have become the most enduring sources of spelling innovations in English. With insights from morphology, this paper utilises a descriptive approach to investigate the effect of habituation, measured in terms of the frequency of use of chat platforms, on the spelling behaviour of one hundred and sixty senior secondary students in rural and cosmopolitan communities. Data is generated from one hundred sixty senior secondary school students with questionnaires and written compositions. The findings indicate that habitual users of SMS/social media chat platforms unconsciously transfer spelling patterns characteristic of social media messaging applications into formal written English. The data also indicate that the phenomenon mainly operates on monosyllabic words vis disyllabic and polysyllabic categories. The paper recommends less prescriptivism of the phenomenon and an understanding of the process as a phase in the evolution of the English language.