Social networks have a growing presence in modern communication. They have their own remarkable features. Online communication led to the development of English language acronyms which are considered a common feature in social networks. The present study aims at exploring the most frequently used acronyms in social network communications and the pragmatic functions of these acronyms. A questionnaire was conducted to elicit the acronyms and their usage from the participants’ point of view. To validate the results, a thousand-line corpus of social network utterances was created and analyzed using text analysis software. The results indicated that there are about 30 acronym which are used in different situations by social network users.
Keywords: Acronyms, Social Networks, pragmatic functions
