Digitalization and Its Effects on Language Use: A Linguistic and Sociolinguistic Analysis

Abstract

Over the past decades, digitalization has triggered profound changes in nearly all areas of society — not least in language. This article examines how digital forms of communication, social media, artificial intelligence, and computer-mediated interaction influence language use in German-speaking societies. The focus lies on lexical innovations, grammatical processes of change, pragmatic shifts, as well as questions of multilingualism and language change. The analysis draws on relevant work in German linguistics, computational linguistics, and sociolinguistics. The findings show that digitalization gives rise to both linguistic innovations and tendencies toward homogenization, and that in doing so it durably transforms established norms of written language, grammar, and communicative convention.