Modern Greek seminar cycle: Echoes in the Feed: A Sociolinguistic Exploration of Digital Tribes

In this presentation, José Antonio Sánchez Fajardo (University of Alicante, Spain) explores the sociolinguistic foundations of "digital tribes", defined as online communities of practice formed around shared interests, ranging from fandoms to conspiracy-theory groups. Drawing parallels between digitalects and urban slang, the study examines how online linguistic markers foster in-group cohesion, reinforce collective identity, and establish linguistic boundaries to exclude outsiders through non-standardness and crypticism. Key sociological factors like permanentness and anonymity shape these interactional spaces. The former encourages lexical richness and language routinization, while anonymity enables digital personas that often stray from face-to-face politeness norms. Through syntactic, morphological, and lexical analyses, the research investigates distinct word-formation patterns, including productive affixes and combining forms (e.g., -porn, -maxxing, -fluencer), as well as "algospeak" strategies used to bypass platform moderation. Using the "Lexical Texture" (LexText) framework, which combines keyness calculations and corpus-based sentiment analysis, the study measures axiological prosody to map shared community stances across platforms like Reddit, Rumble, and YouTube.