THE INFLUENCE OF SOCIAL MEDIA LANGUAGE TRENDS ON INDONESIAN FORMAL WRITING COMPETENCE

Social media has transformed written communication in Indonesia, raising concerns about the transfer of informal digital language into academic contexts. This study aimed to examine the influence of social media language trends on Indonesian formal writing competence and assess the moderating role of register awareness. A quantitative explanatory correlational design was employed with 284 students using questionnaires, a register-awareness scale, a standardized formal writing task, linguistic-error coding, and moderation analysis. The findings showed that frequent use of nonstandard spelling, punctuation omission, abbreviations, and informal lexical forms was negatively associated with formal writing competence, particularly orthographic accuracy and register appropriateness. Daily social media duration alone did not significantly predict writing performance after literacy-related variables were controlled. Register awareness emerged as a positive predictor and weakened the negative relationship between informal digital-language use and formal writing outcomes. Students with strong contextual language awareness maintained high formal writing performance despite participation in informal digital communication. The study concludes that social media language does not inherently weaken formal writing competence. Its influence depends on whether users can distinguish and manage linguistic registers appropriately. Strengthening register awareness, editing skills, and contextual language control offers a more productive educational response than simply restricting digital language use.