DIGITAL BILINGUALISM AND IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION ON INSTAGRAM: A GENDER BASED DISCOURSE-ANALYTIC STUDY OF GEN Z UNIVERSITY STUDENTS

Abstract

Social media has become one of the central spaces of language performance and identity formation among Generation Z university students. In the multilingual setting, Instagram is an overtly visible and public medium through which the bilingual lexical repertoires are purposefully used to build and negotiate sociocultural identities. The current paper explores digital bilingualism and identity construction in the case of students of Generation Z studying at universities through a gendered discourse analytical perspective of publicly shared Instagram posts. The analysis is based on sociocultural and discourse-oriented views of identity and analysed captions, hashtags, comments, and profile biographies that were scraped out of publicly accessible Instagram accounts. Using a qualitative discourse-analytic approach, the study investigates how female and male students mobilise the bilingual linguistic resources to do identity in digitally mediated situations. Findings suggest that despite the fact that both cohorts engage in digital bi-lingualism, gendered dynamics are presented in the discursive production of power, expression of feelings, sense of culture, and understanding of audience. This exploration contributes to the current research on the topic of language, culture and identity as it anticipates the Instagram platform as a viable site of identity performance and demonstrates the role of gender as a comparative lens in digital bilingual practises.