The Global Sociolinguistic Evolution of African American Vernacular English Through Digital Pop Culture Channels

Abstract

The rapid digitization of global communication systems has greatly shifted the path of development of the language, making African American Vernacular English (AAVE) one of the cornerstones of modern digital communication. This paper seeks to explore the socio-linguistic process of elevation of AAVE as an ethnolect into the status of a dominant lingua franca spread globally through the means of pop culture media such as TikTok, Instagram, and X. The core problem examined in the research pertains to the issue of sociolinguistic leveling associated with algorithmic decontextualization of morphosyntactic and lexical markers of AAVE, depriving the latter of its ethnic identity and using it only for the purpose of accruing social capital. Through the lens of Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA), a sample of 200 highly-engaged global media products will be analyzed in terms of the dissemination of particular morphosyntactic structures and lexical terms, with the focus on adoption rates among non-native speakers of English. A universal acceptance rate of nearly 95% was registered for AAVE-derived slang. These results imply that digital media have created a new Prestige Dialect on the basis of engagement rather than geographical or organizational prestige. It is concluded that such development is indicative of the transformation towards the Web Model of English, with linguistic boundaries being ever more fluid. There is, therefore, an acute need for developing critical language awareness in international education in order to overcome the dilemma of linguistic appreciation without cultural destruction. This study lays the groundwork for further research in the field of sociolinguistics of digital pop culture.