This inquiry directs the ‘lens of affect’ on two cases illustrating the circulation of minoritised languages in new media spaces: music video covers from two minority-language contexts, Irish and Sámi, uploaded on YouTube. Linking recent theorising on affect with insights from sociolinguistic inquiry, this paper explores how the YouTube users’ affective investments add to a (re)evaluation of the two minoritised languages, their speakers, and the linked ethnic/national belongings, and how these investments are expressions of more or less banal nationalism, connected to the colonial histories of Ireland and Finland. The inquiry elucidates how the social media act as a catalyst of affective investments involved in an ethnolinguistic (re)ordering of languages and their speakers, at the intersection of ‘banal globalisation’ and ‘everyday nationalism’.