Jan-Mar (2026)

Digital Discourse and the Transformation of English: Pragmatics, Register, and Identity in the Age of Social Media

Chander Mohan

Associate Professor and Head, Department of English, Government Degree College, Majalta, Jammu and Kashmir, India.

This paper examines how digital communication platforms including Twitter/X, Instagram, Reddit, and WhatsApp have become sites of rapid linguistic innovation, generating new registers, pragmatic conventions, and stylistic resources that are reshaping English in ways unprecedented in the history of the language. Drawing on computer-mediated communication research, corpus linguistics, and discourse analysis, the study analyses how the affordances of digital platforms character limits, visual-verbal integration, asynchronous conversation, and massive public audiences have produced distinctive communicative norms that differ substantially from those of spoken or traditional written English. The paper examines four major phenomena: the emergence of 'internet English' as a globally recognised but internally diverse informal register; the role of memes, hashtags, and emoji as paralinguistic and discourse-structuring devices; the use of typographic play as a marker of stance and irony; and the ways in which Black digital culture has driven lexical and pragmatic innovation in online English more broadly. It concludes by considering what these developments mean for the teaching, study, and theorisation of English as a language.

Keywords: Digital discourse, computer-mediated communication, internet English, social media, memes, hashtags,
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Published: 30 MAR 2026

Issue: Jan-Mar (2026)

Section: Articles

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