Linguistics Hybrids And Cross-Cultural Neologisms: A Multilingual Study Of Gen z Expression In Visual Social Media (Instagram, Facebook, And Twitter) Ecosystem

Abstract

This study examines neologism formation on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook among Generation Z (aged 13–28) users. Drawing on Sarala Krishnamurthy’s (2010) neologism model and framing platforms as digital ecosystems, we analyze a corpus of 2,400 social media posts (1,000 Instagram comments, 700 Facebook comments, and 700 Twitter posts from 2024–2025) to identify key wordformation processes. Consistent with previous research, we find that compounding and blending dominate new-word creation on social media (Ibrahim et al., 2024; Shahlee & Ahmad, 2022). Instagram, with its visual affordances and youthful user base, favors compounds (35%), blends (25%), and clippings (20%), yielding playful terms like Gyatt, Delulu, and Knergy. Twitter’s brevity drives acronymy (35%) and semantic shifts (25%), exemplified by FOMO and woke. Facebook, with a broader demographic, shows more compounding (50%) and semantic shift (30%), e.g. squad goals and periodt. These findings indicate that neologisms serve both expressive and social-identity functions in digital contexts. The study highlights previously underexplored factors — such as emoji integration and comment-thread dynamics — and lays groundwork for future research on multilingual and multimodal neologism use.  

 Keywords: Neologisms; Social media linguistics; Instagram; Facebook; Twitter; Generation Z; Digital ecology; Morphological innovation; Platform-specific language.