A CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS OF INTERNET SLANG ACROSS SOCIAL NETWORKS IN ENGLISH AND UZBEK VIRTUAL DISCOURSE

Abstract

This paper presents a comprehensive contrastive-statistical study of the structural localization, sociolinguistic distribution, and morphosemantic adaptation of Internet slang in English and Uzbek virtual discourse. While previous research in digital linguistics has primarily focused on European languages, this study addresses the structural divergence that occurs when digital tokens from analytic English are integrated into the highly agglutinative morphosyntactic system of Uzbek. Examining four major social media platforms—Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, and X (formerly Twitter)—the study investigates how platform-specific architectures, demographic compositions, and functional affordances contribute to the emergence of distinct virtual sociolects. Using an empirical corpus of 10,500 naturally occurring text units, comments, and live-chat logs collected between 2024 and 2026 (Live Linguistic Corpus of Uzbek Social Media Discourse — LLC-USMD), the study evaluates mechanisms of lexical borrowing, morphological hybridization, truncation, and semantic shift. Sociolinguistic stratification indicates that contemporary slang use is strongly generation-specific and unevenly distributed by gender, with the highest frequency observed among users aged 18–25. Overall, this cross-platform structural analysis provides a diagnostic framework for identifying regularities in contemporary language evolution and offers a practical foundation for compiling comprehensive bilingual dictionaries of digital sociolects.