The The Influence of Social Media on Shona Language and Academic Writing in Zimbabwe

Abstract

This qualitative study examines the influence of social media on the Shona language and academic writing in Zimbabwe. It specifically identifies the effects of social media on changes in the Shona language and examines the negative impact of social media language on academic writing. The study utilises Digital Ethnography (DE) and observations as its methods of data collection. The Diffusion of Innovations Theory was employed as the theoretical framework for the study. Findings reveal that social media has facilitated syntactic, phonological, orthographic, lexical, and semantic changes in the Shona language. The results also indicate that these changes affect students’ academic writing skills, thereby posing new challenges and concerns that teachers and students must navigate. It was observed that the informal nature of social media language leads to a loss of formal tone, poor grammar and spelling, and reduced clarity in students’ academic work, weakening the overall quality of their submissions and resulting in lower grades. The study concludes that social media has revolutionised the way people communicate, and languages are no exception. It is also concluded that the changes in the Shona language reflect the casual and spontaneous nature of social media communication, where users emphasise brevity and informality over grammatical writing. We recommend that educators be aware of these effects and provide guidance to students on the importance of maintaining formal language in academic writing, as well as how to differentiate between social media language and academic language, using each in its proper context.