Digital Discourse and Contemporary English: A Linguistic Study of Social Media Communication
Authors-Dr. Hema. S, Dr. Neeti Roy
Keyword-Digital Discourse, Social Media Linguistics, Language Change, Computer-Mediated Communi-cation, Multimodality
While social media sites are today's principal venues for written English usage, the impact of social media on language is only partially acknowledged. The present research analyzes how digital platforms affect modern English through investigating 10,000 posts on Twitter/X, Insta-gram, and TikTok, published between 2021 and 2026. The study utilizes a sequential mixed-method research design combining corpus linguistics and quantitative research with critical discourse analysis. The research findings include a 34.2% increase in the use of hybrid lexical units, a 40.1% decrease in the mean length of sentences, and a 41.3% increase in multimodal pragmatic elements (emojis, hashtags). Comparative platform analysis demonstrates that differ-ent digital platforms cultivate specific registers: TikTok is associated with emotionally-loaded and positionally-driven language; Instagram provides a space for cultivated identity-related lan-guage, whereas Twitter/X remains more informational and intertextual in character.
Doi-[http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23095766]