The Influence of Fandom Language in the Word Formation of Indonesian Internet Slangs

Abstract

Fandom has become a sociocultural phenomenon. The phenomenon as a whole has shown how people consume media and participate in developing a new subculture based on the media. As the usage of the internet increases, social media has become a space that caters to the need of fandom communities, particularly Twitter. Twitter is a very powerful platform to reach a large online audience. With its high mobility function, Twitter has become a comprehensive medium for fandom communities to interact. The goals of this research are to identify the word-formation process in Indonesian internet slang language and to find out how these new slangs are being used in a textual context on Twitter. The research applies qualitative methods with a descriptive approach. In the process of collecting data, 5 tweets that contain fandom language-influenced Indonesian slang from Indonesian Twitter users were obtained. The data analysis is done by using Yule's morphology theory of the word-formation process. The results show that there are influences of fandom language in the creation of Indonesian internet slang words. The majority of word-formation processes of the slang words are multiple processes, indicating that there are not only word transformations, but there are also changes in the meaning. The research implies the adoption of new words from other language experiences meaning change which results in contextual transformation from the original words.