Linguistic Identities in the Digital Space

• Main Author: Biró Enikő
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Sciendo 2019-12-01
• Series: Acta Universitatis Sapientiae: Philologica
• Subjects: digital; linguistic repertoire; identity; code-switching
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.2478/ausp-2019-0011

Within the digital world, new multilingual contacts appeared, which led to a more multilingual Web and enabled local and global participation that assert new identities (Lenihan and Kelly-Holmes 2017). For multilingual people, language choice and code-switching serves as a means for users to perform a specific image of cultural or personal identity and signal their affiliation with a particular community. The paper analyses digital multilingual practices of bilingual (Hungarian-Romanian) university students in Romania. The data consists of students’ public Facebook profiles, examining language choice, code-switching, and hybrid practices. My research question refers to how their linguistic identity is constructed in their online communicative practices. Multilingual practices in the social media are not necessarily connected to language competences in a traditional sense and may serve as a space for resolving conflicting linguistic identities. In my data, students use their diverse linguistic and semiotic resources in varying ways to express and build their online identity, relying on the multimodal affordances of the digital world. Online multilingual practices rely on the speaker’s complete language repertoire, but they do not necessarily depend on language proficiency.