Digital Disruption and Linguistic Change: The Influence of Social Media and Artificial Intelligence on English

Abstract The rapid growth of social media platforms, digital communication applications, and artificial intelligence (AI) systems has significantly impacted the English language landscape in terms of its form, usage, and sociocultural dynamics. This paper discusses the function of digital disruption as a driving force for change in the English language by exploring the areas of lexical creativity, syntactic variability, multimodal discourse, and algorithmic mediation. The social media environment offers an opportunity for the creation of internet slang language, abbreviations, hashtags, emojis, and meme language, which not only enhances the expressive capabilities of the English language but also modifies the pragmatic conventions. Simultaneously, computer-mediated communication offers an opportunity for structural modifications in the English language, including syntactic condensation, use of informal grammar, and multilingual hybrids. Besides the user-driven innovation, other uses of AI technology such as predictive text, autocorrect software, and large language models are also participating in the process of language creation and standardization. Although these applications bring efficiency and increased accessibility, they also bring about a subtle force of homogenization and may be perpetuating the existing linguistic conventions in the form of the training data set. The paper further delves into the cultural and identity implications of digital English and examines how digital English brings about global communication while also bringing about concerns of linguistic inequality and bias. Based on current literature in sociolinguistics and digital communication, the paper argues that digital English is the result of the interaction between human creativity and machine intelligence. Digital evolution does not indicate linguistic decline but rather signals adaptive evolution in the new ecologies of communication. Keywords: language landscape, multimodal discourse, meme language, artificial intelligence