Digital Communication and Multilingual Identity Practices
Summary
Digital communication platforms have transformed how multilingual speakers negotiate and perform identity across global contexts. Rather than treating languages as discrete codes, contemporary research foregrounds translanguaging practices in online interactions, where users draw fluidly on multiple linguistic resources to achieve nuanced social and expressive aims. Social media, messaging apps and collaborative writing environments provide affordances for code-switching, script innovation and multimodal signalling, enabling communities to construct collective identities and assert cultural belonging. These practices range from playful inventions—such as hybrid scripts combining logographic and alphabetic elements—to strategic enregisterment of regional or diaspora voices through memes, emojis and punctuational cues. Such phenomena not only revitalise endangered or minoritised languages but also challenge traditional norms of orthography and language ideology. At the same time, digital platforms mediate power relations, shaping which linguistic repertoires gain prestige and which remain marginal. Understanding multilingual identity in digital spaces therefore requires an interdisciplinary approach that attends to technological design, semiotic flexibility and socio-political context.
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Digital Communication and Multilingual Identity Practices publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in digital communication and multilingual identity practices across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Code-switching: The alternation between two or more languages or language varieties within a single communicative act.
Translanguaging: The integrative use of a speaker’s full linguistic repertoire, transcending traditional boundaries between named languages.
Affordances: The specific features and constraints of digital platforms that enable or shape particular communicative practices.
Enregisterment: The process by which linguistic forms become associated with particular social identities or cultural values.
References
- Tranßcripting: playful subversion with Chinese characters. International Journal of Multilingualism (2019).
- What Does It Meme? English–Spanish Codeswitching and Enregisterment in Virtual Social Space. Languages (2023).
- Bilingual Texting in the Age of Emoji: Spanish–English Code-Switching in SMS. Languages (2024).
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