I used to think that most Trinidadians who spoke dialect online would be able to switch to Standard English whenever necessary. Unfortunately social media has no shown me that this is not so. Of course no one can get it all right and I don't expect them to. Things just seem to be getting a little ridiculous. I won't get into spelling or Wr!+inG lyk ThIs though, because that is a whole other issue. As the world looks on, our grammatical errors like the embarrassing mixing up of 'their' and 'there' (really people?!) just make us seem unintelligent. With online dictionaries and our best friend Google just a click away why not look up the difference between the two words? Even people who call me a Grammar Nazi and try to write at a passable grammatical level on my wall on Facebook or when Tweeting me, often fail.
Dialect is beautiful and makes us unique. The problem is that it seems to be getting used as an excuse for bad grammar. Confront any person on social media and this is usually the response. To me this is giving us and our language a bad reputation especially as we are introducing ourselves to the rest of the world online. With globalization condensing us all into one consciousness, how can we defend the origins of the lack of proper usage of apostrophes on dialect? Here is an actual instance of a friend on Facebook being confronted by someone who is on a totally other level of communication.
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