ENGLISH VOCABULARY AND DIGITAL DISCOURSE: A SYSTEMIC FUNCTIONAL LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS OF SOCIAL MEDIA COMMUNICATION

Abstract

This study examined the influence of social media on contemporary English vocabulary usage among university students. The study was guided by three research questions: how social media influenced vocabulary acquisition, what lexical features characterised social media discourse, and how digital vocabulary related to formal academic language use. A mixed-method design was employed, combining a structured questionnaire (N = 40) with a Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) analysis of 15 digital artifacts drawn from TikTok, Instagram, YouTube Shorts, X (formerly Twitter), and Facebook. Quantitative results indicated that 77.5% of participants reported vocabulary development through social media, and 37.5% reported using informal digital vocabulary in academic writing. SFL analysis revealed that social media discourse functioned across three metafunctions—ideational, interpersonal, and textual—through compressed lexical forms, evaluative language, and multimodal cohesive devices. Findings suggested that social media served as a significant site of incidental vocabulary acquisition while simultaneously exerting informalization pressure on academic registers.