Literary Language Norms in Karakalpakstan Online Media: An Exploratory Medialinguistic Case Study
Abstract
This exploratory study examines how literary-language norms are observed and transformed in Karakalpakstan online media. Its purpose is to identify recurrent lexical, morphosyntactic, graphic, and pragmatic tensions in a small corpus of publicly accessible digital posts and to explain their implications for Karakalpak language culture. The empirical corpus comprises three purposively selected posts published between October 2024 and May 2026 by a private Telegram channel, the Karakalpakstan News Agency, and the Ministry of Preschool and School Education of the Republic of Karakalpakstan. Qualitative medialinguistic analysis was conducted at four levels: orthographic and graphic form, lexical choice and code-switching, morphosyntactic transfer, and stylistic-pragmatic function. The findings show three different pressures on the literary norm: the insertion of Russian or English items for informality and attention, literal transfer from Uzbek that produces lexical and syntactic calques, and inconsistent representation of Karakalpak Latin characters on digital platforms. The selected cases also indicate that institutional status alone does not guarantee normative accuracy, because errors occur in both private and official channels. The article interprets these tendencies through media language, codeswitching, and communicative-rationality frameworks. It proposes editorial language guides, institutionalized linguistic review, standardized digital input tools, and practice-oriented medialinguistics education. Because the corpus is limited, the results establish analytical patterns rather than population-level prevalence