The Impact of Digitalization and Global Media on the Formation of the Modern Norm of the Ukrainian Language in Online Discourse

The fast-paced nature of digitalization and new global media platforms comes with a radical reshaping of the behavior of users when it comes to language, which in turn gives rise to new models concerning linguistic norms and makes necessary a full-spectrum overview on this change at play on the level of language. The relevance of the subject is given by online communication as it largely sets today’s language standards and thus substitutes conventional channels of standardisation. The purpose of the work is to characterize the specificity of the impact on modern Ukrainian linguistic norms in digital platforms, and its object are language processes in new digital spaces. The approach is a mixture of content analysis of online platforms, analysis of international statistical indicators and comparison in variation in the strength of linguistic innovations across areas. Study revealed that language dynamics are rather non-uniform in digital area and thanked to assessment of communication environment structure, but not frequency of its usage. This indicates, that the greatest linguistic variation is observed on social networks and multilingual web spaces, while private channels are characterized by reduce rate of innovation. Hybrid lexical and grammatical forms emerge when driven by multimodality, reaction time, and algorithmic properties of the content. It is well known that the “platform norm” is imposed by language voting far more than academia. The estimates of the integrated index of language change intensity testify the dependence of evolution of the language norm on multi-dimensional interaction between social, technological and algorithmic factors. The practical implication of the findings is that they can be leveraged to make predictions about how languages might evolve, to inform digital language policy and to develop tools for monitoring online communication.