Lexical Transformation of Arabic in the Digital Era: Social Media, Neologisms, and Linguistic Adaptation
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Abstract
The rapid expansion of social media has accelerated lexical change in contemporary Arabic by creating new spaces for linguistic interaction, innovation, and adaptation. This phenomenon is important to examine because digital communication introduces new lexical forms that reflect the influence of globalization, technological development, and changing sociocultural practices among Arabic speakers. This study aims to identify the mechanisms of Arabic lexical change reported in social-media research, analyze the linguistic and sociocultural factors influencing these changes, and discuss their implications for Arabic language education and language policy. This study employed a descriptive qualitative approach through a systematic literature review (SLR) of scholarly publications on Arabic digital language and social-media communication published between 2015 and 2025. Relevant studies were identified through academic databases and supplementary full-text sources, then analyzed using thematic coding and comparative content analysis. The findings reveal three major mechanisms of lexical transformation in contemporary Arabic digital communication: foreign borrowing and Arabization, internal lexical formation and functional specialization of Arabic expressions, and semantic change involving meaning broadening, narrowing, and metaphorical extension. The review also demonstrates that Arabish, Arabic–English code-mixing, and dialectal variation provide important sociolinguistic contexts for the circulation of these lexical forms. Furthermore, lexical choices are shaped by community characteristics, age groups, communicative registers, digital platforms, technological familiarity, prestige, and communicative efficiency. This study concludes that digital Arabic should be understood as a dynamic and adaptive linguistic ecology rather than merely a decline of formal Arabic. The findings highlight the need for register-sensitive Arabic language teaching, systematic documentation of emerging digital vocabulary, and evidence-based terminology planning to respond to ongoing linguistic transformation.
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