DIGITAL DISCOURSE AND LANGUAGE CHANGE: A LINGUISTIC STUDY OF SOCIAL MEDIA’S IMPACT ON CONTEMPORARY ENGLISH
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19442440Keywords:
Digital Discourse, Social Media, Language Change, Contemporary English, Sociolinguistics, Multimodality, Emoji, HashtagsAbstract
This paper looks at the role of social media in the modern English by speeding up lexical change, transforming discourse norms, enhancing and broadening multimodal communication, modifying relationships between speech and writing, standard and nonstandard varieties of English, and local and global varieties of English. The study is a qualitative literature-based research in terms of which the findings were synthesized using the scholarship of sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, computer-mediated discourse analysis, and the studies of the digital media. The analysis demonstrates that social media sites like X, Instagram, Tik Tok, Facebook, Whats App, and YouTube have become one of the central locations of language change due to their ability to facilitate rapid circulation, imitation, remixing and uptake of linguistic forms by masses. Contrary to the claims by opponents of social media as a de-grammaticalizing force, the paper suggests social media opens up new communicative demands and possibilities that foster compression, creativity, stylization, audience design, hashtagging, emojis, code-switching, stance taking and performing identity. The research also confirms the fact that online discourse is becoming more and more multimodal and algorithmically mediated, i.e. language change no longer occurs merely through the interaction of speakers only but rather through the affordances of the platforms, visibility systems, and digitally networked participation. The paper finds that the contemporary English is becoming more hybrid, dynamic, interactive, and socially indexical language variegation due to the digitization and has significant implications on the study of linguistics, literacy, pedagogy, and communication (Crystal, 2011, 2012; Herring, 2004; Androutsopoulos, 2017).
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Copyright (c) 2026 Kiran Gul, Omar J. Alkhatib, Prof. Dr. Asaf Niwaz (Author)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
