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Article published In:
Pragmatics
Vol. 33:2 (2023) ► pp.184–208

How to be authentic on Instagram

Self-presentation and language choice of Basque university students in a multi-scalar context

ORCID logo | University of the Basque Country
| University of the Basque Country
This paper analyses the way young people negotiate their ‘real’ identity on Instagram, and how self-presentation can be developed by means of language choice. We draw our data from the corpus of the Gaztesare project. It contains the Instagram production of Basque university students who draw on an inventory of multilingual resources in their interactions. We consider Instagram to be a multi-scalar context in which different orders of indexicality converge (Blommaert 2010). The study analyses, from this multi-scalar perspective, the place of Basque in the language choices the students make in order to belong, to be authentic as someone or something (Varis and Wang 2011). It concludes that local Basque dialects are tools for self-positioning as an ‘authentic’ voice in Instagram chat, but standard Batua, is empowering at a higher scale on Timelines, in which the same speakers use it for a more credible translocal voice.
Keywords: authenticity, Instagram, Basque, indexicality, scale, normativity, social media
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Authenticity and social meaning of Basque varieties among Basque youth
  • 3.Instagram as a multi-scalar context
  • 4.Participants, corpus and method
  • 5.‘Real me’ on Instagram constructed through language choices at different scales
    • 5.1This is the ‘real’ me on Instagram: The ‘authentic/inauthentic’ indexical meaning of Basque
    • 5.2This is the ‘real’ me on Instagram: Basque varieties and authenticity/inauthenticity indexical meanings
    • 5.3Language choice across scales on Instagram
  • 6.Discussion
  • 7.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
Published online: 14 October 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.21026.elo
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