Pop culture words

Abstract

The English language is a global lingua franca that has itself been experiencing rapid change. This change can be attributed mainly to easy access to the internet worldwide and the popular use of social media. Frequent and common online communication amongst multilingual speakers mediated in English has naturally generated a diverse semiotic repertoire. As a result, new words are constantly and rapidly evolving on online platforms across language boundaries where there is little linguistic authority in place. The forms of many new words in English are becoming more hybridised and complex than ever before and the origins of these words are often difficult to trace because of their simultaneous and multitrajectory pathways.