The English of social media. Investigating the linguistic features of Instagram posts

In the contemporary digital environment, adolescents and young adults are increasingly exposed to English through various forms of digital media, with social media playing a particularly prominent role. While this exposure often occurs incidentally during leisure activities, it contributes to the unconscious acquisition of linguistic structures, vocabulary, and communicative norms. This study investigates the nature of the English language encountered on social media by analysing three corpora of Instagram posts focused on cinema, music, and travel, topics identified as particularly engaging by Italian university language students (Manca 2024). The corpora were compiled from posts published between February 2024 and February 2025 on six high-activity Instagram pages selected for each theme. Adopting a quantitative approach grounded in Biber's (1995; Biber and Conrad 2009) multidimensional analysis, the study explores the distribution of linguistic features characteristic of spoken versus written English. The corpora are also compared against the British National Corpus (BNC) to identify statistically significant deviations in part-of-speech (POS) frequencies. Analysis was conducted using SketchEngine (Kilgarriff et al. 2004) and WMatrix7 (Rayson 2008), employing keyword lists, wordlists, and concordances. The findings provide insights into the hybrid linguistic nature of English in digital spaces and may provide the basis for future research on second language acquisition through social media.