An Error Analysis of Comments and Photo Captions on Social Media: A Study of Youtube and Instagram

Abstract

Social Media like Instagram and YouTube have become part of many people’s daily life in this digital era. People use this platform to express their opinions and thoughts toward something or just simply interact with other people. In communication, language is an essential element that is used. English language is an international language for people to communicate with each other on social media. This study aims to analyze language errors that social media users made in writing comments or photo captions on YouTube and Instagram. A descriptive method was used in this research, where fifty comments and photo captions were selected as the materials. A convenience sampling technique was used to select the comments and photo captions. The language errors were classified into grammatical errors, lexical errors, and mechanical errors. The results of this study show that the most frequent errors in the grammatical category were errors in verb forms, subject-verb agreements, and run-on sentences. In the lexical group, the most frequent errors were prepositions, articles, and word choices. Lastly, the most frequent errors in the mechanical error category were errors in capitalizations, acronyms or abbreviations, and missing commas.