Abstract
<jats:p>The Digital Vernacular: A Corpus-Based Study of Semantic Shifts in Social Media Discourse emerges from the urgent global conversation about how meaning itself is changing in the age of networked communication. While social media is widely recognised as a transformative cultural force, the precise mechanisms by which it accelerates, redirects, and fundamentally restructures the lexicon of contemporary speakers have remained largely under-theorised. This monograph investigates how, why, and at what pace word meanings shift across digital platforms — and what this reveals about the deepening relationship between communication technology and language change. Drawing on a fifteen-year longitudinal corpus spanning four languages and four major platforms — X (formerly Twitter), Reddit, TikTok, and Instagram — the author moves beyond descriptive accounts of internet slang to construct a rigorous empirical and theoretical framework for the digital vernacular: the hybrid, multimodal third space of practice that has emerged at the intersection of writing and speech, of text and image, of human intention and algorithmic curation. Integrating diachronic word embeddings and computational corpus methods with the deep contextual sensitivities of sociolinguistics and pragmatics, the work distinguishes ephemeral viral variation from durable semantic change, examines how multimodal semiotics co-construct lexical meaning, and tests its findings against typologically distinct linguistic environments through comparative case studies in Spanish, Arabic, and Mandarin Chinese. This essential volume offers clarity to linguists, computational researchers, lexicographers, language educators, and policymakers, demonstrating that the study of meaning in the twenty-first century requires both the precision of computational scale and the humanism of careful interpretation. It is a sustained argument that the digital vernacular is not a lesser register or a passing fad, but the principal site at which the next chapter of human language is now being written.</jats:p>