PERTANIKA JOURNAL OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

Twitter, a social media application and a popular microblogging platform, has become a compelling subject in linguistics. The nature of the communication on Twitter is informal, colloquial, and non-standard; and it is likely to contain slangs which is the interest of the modest research embodied in this paper. This study explored the variations of slangs employed by Malay language users through tweets that contained the Malay language keyword ‘makan’ (eat). Primary Qualitative Content Analysis was the research tool employed in this study. Slangs were categorized using an adapted scheme. The analysis found that Malay language users on Twitter implemented a variety of slangs in their online communication, such as shortenings, onomatopoeic spellings, phonetics replacements, inanities, leetspeak, cacography, and emoji. The findings of this study can be useful for developing a lexical database for Malay language slangs.