DIGITALIZATION AND PROFESSIONAL LITERACY: A PRAGMATIC ANALYSIS OF ABBREVIATION USE AND LANGUAGE TRANSFORMATION

Annotasiya

The article examines the pragmatic use of abbreviations in professional discourse, considering how digital communication reshapes the norms of efficiency, clarity and etiquette. While abbreviations can speed up communication and facilitate rapid information processing in emails, chat platforms and collaborative tools, their pragmatic value depends on the audience, genre and institutional conventions. Misunderstandings can arise when shorthand lacks a shared basis or when different forms carry different pragmatic meanings in different cultural and organisational contexts. The study highlights the tension between minimising linguistic effort and maintaining professional identity, face-saving practices and inclusivity. Opaque abbreviations can exclude novices, non-native speakers and cross-disciplinary collaborators. The study therefore argues for a situated, adaptive approach: communicators should calibrate their use of abbreviations according to formality, relationship, medium and accessibility concerns. Organisations, meanwhile, can promote clarity by providing glossaries, style guides and training. Methodologically, corpus-informed analyses combined with pragmatics and discourse studies reveal patterns of conventionalisation and innovation in abbreviation use. The article concludes by urging further empirical work on multimodal contexts and pedagogical interventions that balance communicative efficiency with politeness, transparency and equitable participation in digitally mediated professional settings.