Previous studies on the use of argot in online gaming communities have highlighted the need for further research in other contexts. However, existing studies mainly focus on analyzing Argot in LGBT community, songs, adversarial text, and criminal dialects. Only few researches focus on the use of Argot in Mobile Legends gamers. Thus, this study aims to discover the Argot words used by freshmen students, the linguistic features of the Argot words of the freshmen students, and how the gamers use Argot in their conversation. The study employed a qualitative research design, utilizing observations to gather data. The participants of this study were 10 freshmen college students from the University of Mindanao who have been playing Mobile Legends. These freshmen college student-participants self-identified themselves as someone who has been playing Mobile Legends and had the intensity of playing for approximately 3-10 hours a day. Results revealed that the common argot words that the freshmen students used in their conversation while playing Mobile Legends are snowball, record, ban, XP, support, marksman, lag, bronze, nerf, disconnect, noob, map skills, offline, FQ, report, build, invade, lane, show-off, depressing, and confused. The linguistic features of the argot words used by freshmen students in conversations while playing Mobile Legends is characterized by a mixture of technical terminology, abbreviations, role-specific language, gaming jargon, and emotional expressions.  

applied linguistics

argot

conversations

mobile legends

freshmen student-gamers

qualitative

Philippines