Virtual Space and New Language Practices: Memes, Slang, and Lexical Transformations

By 2025, over 5. 2 billion people worldwide will use social media, representing approximately 63.9. 9% of the global population, with a growth rate of 4. 4.1% in the past year. Popular platforms include Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and WhatsApp. On average, users spend about 2 hours and 26 minutes daily on social media, accessing around seven different platforms. Communication on social media follows the same language norms—lexical, spelling, grammar, and syntax—as spoken language. This article aims to provide an in- depth analysis of lexical innovations in the language landscape shaped by social media and digital communication tools. It focuses on modern vocabulary used across platforms like Twitter, TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram. Special attention is given to modern English, which is the most widely used language in digital communication—approximately 1. 5 billion people speak English, and 52% of the world' s most popular websites contain English content. Using scientific and linguistic methods, the article explores how social media influences language at all structural and functional levels: lexical, phonetic, grammatical, syntactic, and graphic. It highlights characteristic lexical changes within groups, including memes, neologisms, abbreviations, acronyms, phraseological units, and hashtags. The functions of different types of lexical innovations on social networks are identified: hashtags promote seamless intercultural communication, neologisms help build group identities, memes serve entertainment and informational roles, and they disseminate prior information through text and graphics. The article also discusses negative effects of social networks on language, such as oversimplification, loss of nuanced expression, emergence of inaccuracies and grammatical errors in spontaneous communication, and potential adverse effects on mental health. Overall, the study shows that modern language practices reflect new concepts in social media culture—such as interactivity, upgrading, and visualization that are transforming cultural and religious aspects and driving sustainable language change.