AN ANALYSIS OF ABBREVIATIONS USED BY TWITTER SOCIAL MEDIA USERS

This research aims to find out the abbreviation types used in tweets by
Twitter users in education topic and entertainment topic. In addition, also to
find out the similarities and differences between abbreviations found in
education and entertainment topic in Twitter. This research used Schendl’s
theory of five types abbreviations. The research methodology used is
descriptive qualitative content analysis, and the corpus of the study consist
of tweets containing abbreviations. Data was collected over a one-month
period from February 18th to March 18th 2023 by using documentation and
classification table to analyze the data. The result indicate that a total 211
abbreviations were found in Twitter, with 103 abbreviations in
entertainment and 108 abbreviations in entertainment topic. All five types
of abbreviations have been found. They are 44 clipping words (15
entertainment, 19 education), 25 blends (8 entertainment, 13 education) 19
acronyms (7 entertainment, 9 education), 98 initialisms (47 entertainment,
40 education), and 80 contraction (26 entertainment, 27 education). From
the finding it can be concluded that the types abbreviation which dominantly
found in education and entertainment topics is initialism, and the least found
is acronym.
Keywords: Abbreviation, Education Topic, Entertainment Topic, Twitter