Language Use, Learning, and Innovation in Social Media: A Systematic Literature Review of Multilingual Digital Communication

Abstract

Social media has become a major site for multilingual digital communication, where language is used, learned, transformed, and ideologically negotiated across platforms such as TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and X/Twitter. This systematic literature review examines the state of research on language use, learning, and innovation in social media by synthesizing 75 selected studies published between 2020 and 2026. Guided by the PRISMA approach, the review identifies five dominant themes: translanguaging, code-switching and multilingual digital repertoires; social media, informal language learning and digital pedagogy; lexical innovation, slang, hashtags, memes and cyberlanguage; computational, corpus-based and language technology approaches; and language ideologies, minority language visibility, digital power and online representation. The findings show that the literature is most concentrated on social media as an informal language-learning and pedagogical space, followed by studies on multilingual digital repertoires and lexical innovation. The review further reveals that social media enables users to combine languages, scripts, emojis, memes, hashtags, and multimodal resources to construct identity, negotiate belonging, and generate new linguistic forms. However, the field remains fragmented across linguistic, educational, technological, and ideological domains. This review contributes an integrated understanding of multilingual digital communication and highlights the need for future research on underrepresented languages, non-Western platforms, algorithmic visibility, digital inequality, and ethical issues in online language practices.