ENGLISH AS A BUSINESS LINGUA FRANCA IN DIGITAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP: A DISCOURSE-ANALYTICAL STUDY OF ASIAN BUSINESS COMMUNICATION

The expansion of digital entrepreneurship in Asia has intensified the use of English as a shared medium for online entrepreneurial communication, particularly on social media platforms. While English used for international business communication has been extensively examined in corporate and institutional settings, limited discourse-analytical research has explored how English functions in digital entrepreneurial contexts using secondary social media data. This study investigates the linguistic and pragmatic patterns of English used in digital entrepreneurial communication in Asian online environments. The analysis is based on a secondary dataset comprising 800 English-language business- and technology-oriented social media texts. A qualitative discourse-pragmatic approach was employed to examine lexical, pragmatic, and discourse features. The results show a high frequency of business-related lexical items, with terms such as technology (35 occurrences) and business (33 occurrences) appearing most prominently. Pragmatic analysis reveals frequent use of modal verbs for stance-marking, particularly could (29 occurrences) and should (27 occurrences), indicating a preference for mitigated and inclusive communication. Persuasive engagement strategies were also prominent, with calls-to-action such as join and discover each occurring 29 times. At the discourse level, the findings demonstrate consistent construction of entrepreneurial identity through inclusive language and solution-oriented messaging. Overall, the study shows that English is used flexibly and functionally in digital entrepreneurial communication, with communicative effectiveness and audience engagement prioritized over formal linguistic accuracy, thereby extending research on English used for international business communication into social-media-based digital entrepreneurship.