Signs of Digital Discourse in Written Speech of Adolescents (on the Example of an Essay)

Modern adolescents, according to social psychologists, have features of cognitive and personal spheres. Under the influence of online culture their psychomotor skills change, poly-linguistic consciousness develops, perception is structured in a special way, etc. The communicative culture of a modern adolescent has undergone significant changes. The object of the research is the written speech of a modern schoolchild. The subject of the research is the influence of the Internet discourse on the written speech of a digital representative. The aim of the study is to determine whether digital communication unfolding on the Internet affects the written language of modern adolescents. The material for the research was codified genres of written speech (essays). The research methods are observation and linguistic analysis of the written text. The theoretical basis of this work was the theory of speech activity, works on the psychology of speech and psycholinguistics, as well as linguistic works aimed at analyzing the oral and written discourse of the Internet. The influence of oral and written discourse on the oral speech of a modern adolescent has been sufficiently well studied, however, the problem of the influence of the Internet communication on the written speech of a “digital person” has not previously become a subject of a research. The conducted research allowed the author to draw the following conclusions. Firstly, the ontogeny of oral, written, oral and written speech is fundamentally different. The development of oral and written speech among millennials took place after the child had developed the skill of writing. Secondly, the peculiarity of the generation of buzzers is that they begin to master two forms of speech (oral and oral-written) simultaneously and in parallel. This feature of Gen Z representatives has not been taken into account before. The oral and written forms have a significant impact on the written language of modern adolescents. This is especially evident in less codified genres. The signs of the oral-written form of speech, characteristic of the Internet, were noticed in genres with a rigid structure.