Contemporary youth slang in media texts: trends, functions, development prospects
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.47475/2070-0695-2026-60-2-110-120Keywords:
slang, youth, media text, internet slangAbstract
This article is devoted to a comprehensive analysis of contemporary youth slang as it functions in media texts on digital platforms, with the aim of identifying its structural, semantic, and pragmatic features, as well as the key trends in its development within mediatized communication. The purpose of the study is to determine the role of youth slang as a significant linguistic resource in contemporary media discourse and to identify its contribution to the formation of communicative strategies and the sociocultural identity of the youth audience. The theoretical foundation of the study rests on the tenets of sociolinguistics (W. Labov, D. Hymes), media linguistics and multimodal analysis (G. Kress, T. van Leeuwen), and pragmalinguistics (J. Austin, J. Searle). Methodologically, the research employs content analysis combined with elements of corpus analysis, as well as descriptive‑analytical and functional‑pragmatic approaches, which ensures a comprehensive interpretation of the material. The combination of methods is justified by the need to correlate quantitative indicators (frequency, distribution across platforms and types of media texts) with the contexts of use and communicative intentions of slang users, thereby linking the quantitative picture with pragmatic functions and the social conditions of use. The empirical basis of the study comprises 74 units of youth slang extracted from media texts from 2023–2025 posted on TikTok, YouTube, VKontakte, Telegram, and Steam. The primary units of analysis are individual slang lexemes, stable collocations, and memetic constructions; collocations and fixed phraseological units are treated as unitary communicative units where they function as fixed semantic and pragmatic complexes.
The analysis reveals a predominance of English‑language borrowings and a high presence of gaming community vocabulary; the main thematic groups of slangisms are identified, as is their polyfunctional nature, which includes expressive‑evaluative, identificational, contact‑establishing, and ludic functions. The conclusion formulates the dual nature of youth slang, combining the relative stability of its core with the high dynamism of its periphery, and underscores the need for further research to deepen the study of renewal processes in youth language and its pragmatic potential.
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