A morphological analysis of

slang words used by Filipino

online gamers
Rosanes, Aries Julius C. 
Pera, Sander De Vera
Taduran, Renee
Teope, Dhyan Rosel E.
INTRODUCTION
As of April 2020, mobile devices became the most popular gaming platform in the Philippines. Playing on PC’s
and game consoles were also popular among the gaming community. The Philippines is home to at least 106
million people and the greater part of the entire population are internet users. Among these internet users are also a
great number of online gamers. These online activities have become vital in every Filipino’s daily lives nowadays,
especially in this time of social distancing. Filipinos found a way to cope with restrictions in travelling and moving
around the city during the COVID-19 pandemic, and one of these activities was online gaming (Sanchez, 2021).
Online games have a great impact on society especially with the lives of teenagers. Teenagers who often play these
online games are specified as players or gamers. These online gamers can spend a day or more in front of
computers playing their addicting online games. These online gamers can spend several hours or even a day or
more playing their addicting online games. The major addicting element found in all these games is not the ranking
or the leveling up feature, rather the vast interactions among gamers. In interactions, conversations exist (Auman,
2015).
Online games have been overly popular and it has helped pave the way for special terms to be created by its
players. From this, an innovative sublanguage was formed, which consisted of new words and abbreviations that
have helped the online community to communicate and cooperate with one another (Hanney, 2016).
INTRODUCTION
•
According to Kropacheva & Litvinova (2020), Difficulties in describing such notions as vernacular, common slang
and slang and the reference of certain lexical units or texts to a particular language phenomenon stem from the
variety of opinions and ways of defining each of them. Even though slang is commonly used in the internet world,
most of the speakers do not know and understand the language they are using. It is because it has become a part of
normal conversation on the internet. This proves the statement of Roth-Gordon (2020) that says people use slang
to align with friends or with a trend in society.
The study of slang is often overlooked because people think that there is no deeper meaning to it and that slang
words are nothing but temporary language trends. But according to Kropacheva & Litvinova (2020), the study of
slang offers deep insight into the identities, cultural and linguistic ideologies, and power relations within and
between social groups. In fact, these word groups are used by some groups of people for special goals. Slangs are
new meaningful words used in different social groups (Hajizade, 2020). Milyoshina (2021) supports these ideas in
her study when she said that her study complements the existing  linguistics ideas about the concept of "youth
(school) slang"; she further added that her paper can be used in the scientific and methodological aspect of creating
dictionaries of this sociolect.
INTRODUCTION
The main objective of this study is to analyze how online Filipino slang
words are formed and used by online gamers. To reach this objective, the
researchers aim to:

•  1) Identify slang words used by Filipino online gamers

• 2) Classify the slang words based on their morphological word formation.

• 3) Analyze how internet slang is formed.

THEORETICAL
FRAMEWORK
This paper follows the theory about slang words proposed by Allan and Burridge
(2006). To define slang, Pudinyati et al. (2018) said that Allan and Burridge (2006)
defined slang as the marker of some group of people. The examples are communities
sharing experiences (such as groups of children at certain schools) and particular social
groups (such as hookers, junkies, jazz musicians, or professional criminals). From the
definition above, it can be concluded that slang is a non-formal or casual spoken
language that is created and used by people in a particular group. Slang reflects the
social background of people who use it. According to Putrawan et al. (2020), There are
five types of slang in the theory of Allan and Burridge (2006), these are fresh and
creative, imitative, flippant, acronym, and clipping. The researchers will classify the
slang words used by the online gamers using these five types of slang.
STATEMENT OF THE
PROBLEM
To analyze the online Filipino slang words used by online gamers, the
researchers aim to answer the following questions:

1)      What are the most common Filipino slang words used by online gamers?

2)      How are these slang words classified based on their word formation?

3)      What morphological processes are involved in the formation of the slang
used by Filipino online gamers?
METHODS AND
TEHNIQUES
This concept paper utilises the exploratory-interpretative
paradigm of research to satisfy the objectives (Davies &
Elder, 2004). This is a non-experimental design, so the data
are collected and interpreted qualitatively. The source of the
data is through administration of online surveys in order to
know which distinct Filipino slang word a gamer typically
uses.
RESPONDENTS/PART
ICIPANTS
• Online Streamers
• Online Gamers
RESEARCH
INSTRUMENT
The research instruments used in this study are mobile devices and computer devices. The
researchers will use a modified questionnaire to gather the needed data for the study. The
researchers will make use of a researcher made questionnaire for the identification of the
demographic data of the participants. The set of questions made by the researchers were formulated
to cater the following: 
•To analyse how Filipino slang words are formed 
•To examine how Filipino morphemes affect or change the meaning of the word. 
• To know what morphological process is used and how the word changes or develops its
meaning 
•To determine the different morphological process to form new lexical item
DATA GATHERING
PROCEDURE
The researchers will invite 20 online stream gamers to
respond in the researcher-made questionnaire through Google
Form. Each word listed will be analyzed following  the
research paradigm presented in Chapter 1. 
DATA ANALYSIS
The steps in the structural analysis are: First, identifying all morphemes
from the data that had been collected. Second component is word
formation, which explains how morphemes of language are arranged in a
group to form a word in language. The third is morphophonology
processes, a mechanism of morphophonology process which shows the
changes that occur in the merger of morphemes, such as assimilation,
release, addition, replacement and permutation. The last component to be
conducted by the researcher is to verify each slang word's existence in the
dictionary.
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