The widespread use of social media enables linguists to study changes in language usage in real time. A notable recent example is the proliferation of the affix meng- among speakers of Bahasa Indonesia, the official language of Indonesia. Linguists observed meng- originate as an onomatopoetic tag that social-media users applied to images of cats they posted; over time, users increasingly applied it as a prefix to existing words (e.g., mengsedih affixes meng- to the word for sad) in text that they posted. From there, it has begun to move into spoken Bahasa Indonesia. Linguists have noted many similar examples of this phenomenon occurring in other languages, suggesting that social media ______blank