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Part of
The Discursive Construction of Identities On- and Offline: Personal - group - collective
Edited by Birte Bös, Sonja Kleinke, Sandra Mollin and Nuria Hernández
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 78] 2018
► pp. 109–132

Code-switching and identity construction in WhatsApp

Evidence from a (digital) community of practice

| University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany
This paper examines how the use of WhatsApp promotes the linguistic construction of group identity and social meaning in a close-knit community of practice of six German university students. A quantitative and qualitative analysis of a private WhatsApp group chat, supported by the findings from a group-specific questionnaire, suggests that code-switching between English and German proves a powerful resource of group identity construction. The code-switches fulfil a variety of functions and are shown to be the overall unmarked choice in the group. Governed by the technical and social factors of WhatsApp as a multi-modal digital discourse mode, the CofP members draw on various verbal strategies and linguistic structures in order to negotiate social relationships and facets of group identity online.
Keywords: code-switching, digital discourse, group identity, community of practice, social networks, markedness model, WhatsApp
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Code-switching and group identity: Theoretical dimensions
    • 2.1Major concepts and approaches to code-switching and group identity
    • 2.2Social dynamics and identity in DD
  • 3.WhatsApp as a socio-technical mode
    • 3.1Classification of WhatsApp
      • 3.1.1Medium factors
      • 3.1.2Situation factors
    • 3.2Data and methodology
  • 4.Analysis of the WhatsApp data
    • 4.1Quantitative analysis
    • 4.2Qualitative analysis
      • 4.2.1Discursive functions
      • 4.2.2Social functions
  • 5.Questionnaire results and discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 23 July 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.78.05wen
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