DOI: https://doi.org/10.36719/2706-6185/61/296-301
The Impact of Digital Communication on Textuality: A Comparative Analysis of English and Azerbaijani
Fatima Novruzlu
Abstract. Digital communication has profoundly transformed the nature of textuality in both English and Azerbaijani contexts, affecting language structure, stylistic conventions, and the interactional norms of written discourse. The evolution of online platforms—including social media, messaging applications, and digital forums—has encouraged brevity, immediacy, and multimodality in textual expression. English, as a globally dominant language in digital spaces, exhibits widespread use of abbreviations, emojis, hashtags, and memes, reflecting both linguistic economy and the need to convey affective meaning rapidly. In contrast, Azerbaijani, while increasingly influenced by these global digital trends, maintains certain structural and grammatical particularities, including agglutinative morphology and context-dependent sentence constructions, which interact uniquely with digital shorthand and visual markers of communication .
Comparatively, English digital texts often prioritize directness and global comprehensibility, leveraging standardized syntax and widespread conventions that facilitate cross-cultural interaction. Azerbaijani digital communication, while adapting similar strategies, demonstrates a more hybrid textuality: users negotiate between traditional linguistic norms and the pressures of digital brevity, producing hybrid forms that mix Latin-based abbreviations, code-switching, and local syntactic patterns. These patterns reveal not only the flexibility of the Azerbaijani language in accommodating technological mediation but also highlight the interplay between digital literacy, cultural identity, and language preservation.
Keywords: digital, textuality, linguistic, language, slang, grammar