INVESTIGATING THE IMPACTS OF EMOJIS THROUGH SOCIAL MEDIA ON MODERN LANGUAGE IN COMMUNICATION

Abstract

The research problem is the effect of emojis on contemporary linguistic issues in social media communication, including how emojis affect tone and emotional context, whether emojis can simplify/expand the expression or not, and how this type of non-verbal communication functions as a substitute of non-verbal communication. The study is based on a pragmatic paradigm, which takes the form of mixed-method research design that uses a quantitative questionnaire with structured research in form of a questionnaireand qualitative discourse analysis using the texts found naturally on social media. The intended audience will be active social media consumers, mainly university students and young adults as the representatives of high-frequency digital communicators in multilingual contexts. Participants were recruited with convenience, and all data were summarized using descriptive statistics (frequencies, means, and standard deviations) to provide a general overview of the shape of questionnaires and thematic and discourse analysis were used to analyze the functions of emojis in real interactional settings. Results have shown that perceived benefits of emojis are strong in enhancing clarity of emotions, establishing fewer misunderstandings, and assisting users to extract tone, including humour and sarcasm. Emojis also save the participants the time needed to use long explanations and enhance expressive ability, which implies that emojis do not substitute but supplement language. Qualitative themes also reveal emojis as emotional amplifying devices, tone markers, the means of linguistic economy, and replacements of facial expressions and gestures, making plausible their application as paralinguistic devices in text communication. In general, this research concludes that emojis form part of digital discourse in the present day, which makes multimodal meaning-making and transforms language practices on the social media.