A semiotic study of lingua-culture of digital paralanguages

Lingua does not include only textual or symbolic forms or even pictograms. It has other cultural underpinnings, norms, and culturally bound expressions, which invariably are missing from the digital Paralanguages provided by social media platforms. In the absence of these critical aspects of lingua in their digital forms, social media platforms offer creative tools to develop digital Paralanguages for use. This study attempts to elucidate the link between the indigenous digital paralanguage development and the link to the lingua-culture of the people, which is missing in the discourse of Paralanguages in social media from an agential realist perspective. This research employs a socio-semiotic study (which looks at the meanings embedded in the diverse modes of objects) on the Twi lingua culture of the people of Ghana as used as a mode of communication in social media platforms, specifically WhatsApp. This paper contributes to the academic literature by extending the discourse on digital paralanguage development with lingua culture