Multimodal Communication
A study in E-Linguistics
the internet said "hold my grammar" 💀
Language,
Evolving.
English is
lowkey
mutating.
Final-year thesis
E-Linguistics track
COBAEFN231P—010
Survey · Interview · 4 datasets
How memes, GIFs, emojis & Gen Z slang are reshaping modern English. 🌐 how the girlies & the group chats speedran a whole new English. 🌐
Language is a moving target. As communication shifts from the page to the screen, four visual-verbal modes — memes, GIFs, emojis, and Gen Z slang — have started doing the work that grammar, tone and body language used to do in person. This dissertation asks whether that is decline, or evolution. Across a survey of 210 people, twelve expert interviews, and four compiled datasets totalling over 140,000 records, the answer leans hard toward evolution. tl;dr — talking moved from paper to phone, and four things (memes, gifs, emojis, slang) quietly took over the jobs that grammar and body language used to do irl. is it english falling off? or english glowing up? 210 people, 12 experts and 140k+ data points later... it's giving evolution, no cap. 📈
What if a 💀 can say more than a whole sentence ever could? what if 💀 hits harder than an entire paragraph, actually.
Same message.
Two registers.
The core finding in miniature: the what stays constant while the how transforms completely. Watch one conversation flip between standard English and its Gen Z rendering — nothing is lost in meaning, but tone, speed and emotional colour are rebuilt from scratch using emojis, slang and reaction language.
88.1% of surveyed users reach for emojis routinely; 87.1% do it to inject humour. The bottom register isn't broken English — it's a parallel dialect optimised for screens.
Showing: Standard English register
Four ways the screen learned to talk.
Each mode was analysed as a linguistic device with its own grammar, drawing on a purpose-built dataset. Together they cover reaction, emotion, tone and lexicon.
Emojis 😂
the new punctuation.
The most-used mode by a distance. Emojis do tone work that plain text can't — softening, emphasising, or flipping the meaning of a sentence entirely. In the compiled dataset they cluster hardest around celebration, affection and humour, but the same glyph means different things across cultures: 🙏 reads as "thanks" to some, "prayer" to others.
Top platform: Reddit · then Instagram, Twitter, TikTok
Memes 🗿
argument & in-joke.
Memes are the mode that carries culture. They compress a shared reference, a stance and a punchline into a single frame — and they skew overwhelmingly positive: 60% of sampled memes register as positive sentiment, only 11% negative. A meme can be a whole reply, replacing the sentence entirely. As one UX designer put it in interview, memes have changed how humour gets carried in text at all.
GIFs 🎞️
motion as tone of voice.
If emojis are punctuation, GIFs are body language. A three-second loop delivers timing, facial expression and reaction that static text drops on the floor. Interviewees noted GIFs convey emotions "that are difficult to phrase" — and increasingly stand in for a full written response. 57.1% of participants use them regularly.
Slang stays fiercely context-bound — it lives in the DMs, not the essay.
Slang 🔥
lexicon on fast-forward.
The lexical engine. Slang recycles old words into new meanings ("slaps," "lit," "sus"), coins fresh ones, and reshapes sentence structure. It's generational glue and a gatekeeper at once — 64.8% use it daily, but barely 1.4% carry it into academic or professional writing. Explore all 200+ terms from the dataset below. 👇
Four decades of English learning new tricks.
One message, many channels feeding it meaning.
Meaning is no longer carried by text alone. It's assembled — text, emoji, meme, GIF and slang each contributing a layer the others can't.
What 210 people & 140k records agreed on.
Emojis lead everything
Routine emoji use outranks memes (67.1%), slang (58.1%) and GIFs (57.1%). The default layer of digital tone.
It's for the humour
Humour is the number-one reason people reach for these modes; 79.5% cite expressing emotion, 48.1% clarifying tone.
Gen Z drives it
Gen Z accounts for ~80% of multimodal use, Millennials 17.6%, with Gen X (1.4%) and Boomers (1%) trailing far behind.
Overwhelmingly positive
Memes skew positive (60%) far more than negative (11%) — these modes mostly build warmth, not conflict.
Casual, not formal
Slang thrives in everyday chat but almost vanishes (1.4%) in academic or professional writing. Register is intact.
Evidence at scale
Emoji (5k) + Meme (10k) + Slang (500) + GIF (125,781) records, cross-read against survey and interview data.
200+ terms, straight from the dataset.
Tap any term to see its definition and a real usage example. Filter by how hard it's trending. This is the actual Gen Z slang corpus behind the study. 🔎
The findings, in the format of the study. 🗿
A case study on internet language should speak the language. Each card below encodes a real finding in a classic meme format.
OR EVOLVING?
🧠✨ "lol"
🌌 "😂"
💥🌌 "💀"
IT'S JUST
EVOLVING."
"I enjoy memes…
but I don't understand
a single Gen Z term." 🧓
Meme cards are original compositions in classic formats — built self-contained to stay license-clean, in the spirit of the study's dataset of 10,000 memes.
When words won't do the tone. 🎞️
Live GIFs, embedded from GIPHY — the mode interviewees said carries emotion "difficult to phrase." This is what a reply looks like when it's pure motion.
GIFs embedded via giphy.com · animated emoji references: Emojipedia & LottieFiles
English isn't
breaking down.
It's levelling up.
english isn't
falling off.
it's glowing up. ✨
Multimodal communication is not a passing internet habit — it's a structural change in how English is used online.
Memes, GIFs, emojis and Gen Z slang have taken over jobs once done by grammar, punctuation and physical presence: carrying tone, timing, humour and emotional nuance. They make communication faster, warmer and more expressive — and they've built a genuine generational dialect, led decisively by Gen Z.
The tension the study surfaces is real: the same features that add expressiveness raise fair questions about literacy and cross-cultural misreading. But the evidence points to evolution over erosion. Register stays intact — people code-switch, keeping slang in the group chat and formal English in the essay. The task ahead isn't to police the change, but to understand it.
Wider samples
Extend beyond Gen Z and Millennials to older and ESL speakers for a fuller generational picture.
Literacy & learning
Study how these modes affect reading, writing and language acquisition in classrooms.
Cross-cultural reading
Map how emoji and meme meaning diverges across cultures to reduce misinterpretation.
AI, AR & VR
Track how neural language models and immersive tech will shape the next multimodal register.