How to be authentic on Instagram: Self-presentation and language choice of Basque university students in a multi-scalar context
Abstract
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 2010Blommaert, Jan 2010 The Sociolinguistics of Globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ). 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 2011Varis, Piia, and Xuan Wang 2011 “Superdiversity on the Internet. A Case from China.” Language and Diversity 13 (2): 71–83.
). 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:
Publication history
Table of contents
- Abstract
- Keywords
- 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
- 6.Discussion
- 7.Conclusions
- Funding
- Notes
- References
- Address for correspondence
- Biographical notes
1.Introduction
I would say yes I am a little different. When I use Euskara Batua, I see a more serious Maite, a Maite who can become more important in front of people, because she expresses herself with greater intensity… And when I speak in Biscayan, I don’t think this image is that serious, but rather [that] of a person who is closer to others. And that’s the real ‘me’.
(Maite, 4th year student of Audio-visual Communication at
the University of the Basque Country)
The relationship between self-presentation, or the ‘real me’ as expressed by Maite in this excerpt, and the language choices made on Instagram in order to achieve that ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ identity is the main focus of this paper. In this example, Maite was asked why she always used her Biscayan dialect in her chat interactions on Instagram, no matter the Basque variety used by the person who interacts with her. In the interviews, we showed her some examples of her own messages in which she was chatting in ‘Directs’ with people from other areas of the Basque Country, or in a group chat that includes new speakers of Basque. Maite’s answer reveals that the Biscayan dialect evokes for her realness and authenticity and, consequently, she considers it as the appropriate Basque in her self-presentation in an informal interactional context such as Instagram Directs. In other words, Biscayan dialect resources are considered the appropriate tools for the self-positioning of an informal and authentic voice. We also asked her if it were possible for her to use standard Basque or Euskara Batua in that same context, and what would that change in her self-presentation. Her reply was that, in a chat context, Euskara Batua [Batua] is considered ‘fake’, ‘too academic’ or ‘too serious’ by young people. It is not the ‘everyday spoken language’ they use in chats, in which, Maite adds, “we write the way we speak”.
Such metalinguistic reflections constitute the ethnolinguistic corpus from which we draw the data of the research reported upon in this paper, which in turn grew out of a broader study developed within the Gaztesare research project in 2019 (Elordui et al. 2020Elordui, Agurtzane, Jokin Aiestaran, Garbiñe Bereziartua, Irantzu Epelde, Orreaga Ibarra, Oroitz Jauregi, Libe Mimenza, Beñat Muguruza, and Ane Odria 2020 Gaztesare Corpus and Data-base. https://basquearchive.eus/eu/gaztesare-proiektua/). This research is based on individual interviews and one focus group with five Basque university students aged between 18 and 25.
Herein, we focus on what counts as authentic language for self-presentation on Instagram and on young Basque speakers as agents who draw on linguistic resources for purposes of identity management (Bucholtz 2003Bucholtz, Mary 2003 “Sociolinguistic Nostalgia and the Authentication of Identity.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 7 (3): 398–416. ; Bucholtz and Hall 2005Bucholtz, Mary, and Kira Hall 2005 “Identity and Interaction: A Sociocultural Linguistic Approach.” Discourse Studies 7 (4–5): 585–614.
), always within the context of a prevailing normativity. In fact, what counts as authentic is generated in social actions and constructed by speakers in everyday communication, primarily through stylistic language choices (Irvine 2001Irvine, Judith T. 2001 ““Style” as Distinctiveness. The Culture and Ideology of Linguistic Differentiation.” In Style and Sociolinguistic Variation, ed. by Penelope Eckert, and John R. Rickford, 21–43. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
, 22); and in our case, through stylistic language choices in a social media platform such as Instagram.
We developed a methodology aimed at exploring the styliser positioning of those five students in depth, based on a corpus of their written production on Instagram’s Timelines and Directs from 2013 to 2019. But we also analyse the perception they have about their own stylistic choices through interviews and discussion groups in which we presented them with examples found in their own Instagram accounts. We focus on (i) how such stylistic choices may be shaped by a desire to project a ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ identity as well as whether choosing Basque is considered appropriate for that goal and why, and (ii) if so, which resources from Basque they consider to be the better tools in order to achieve that goal. Furthermore, we explore whether (iii) Basque varieties evoke different indexicality with respect to authenticity across different Instagram contexts or scale-levels; for instance, across chats and Timelines.
Sociolinguistic authenticity is often generated locally and indicates a value system that is able to anchor local social and cultural identities (Coupland 2001Coupland, Nikolas 2001 “Stylisation, Authenticity and TV News Review.” Discourse Studies 3 (4): 413–442. , 2003 2003 “Sociolinguistic Authenticities.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 7 (3): 417–431.
). Maite’s stylistic choices, for instance, are a clear reflection of a local value system among Basque youth, in which local dialects are linked with genuineness and authenticity, as Urla et al. (2016Urla, Jacqueline, Estibaliz Amorrortu, Ane Ortega, and Jone Goirigolzarri 2016 “Authenticity and Linguistic Variety among New Speakers of Basque.” In Language Documentation & Conservation Special Publication 9, ed. by Vera Ferreira, and Peter Bouda, 1–12. University of Hawaii Press.
, 2018 2018 “Basque Standardization and the New Speaker. Political Praxis and the Shifting Dynamics of Authority and Value.” In Standardizing Minority Languages. Competing Ideologies of Authority and Authenticity in the Global Periphery, ed. by Pia Lane, James Costa, and Haley De Korne, 24–46. London & New York: Routledge.
) explain in detail. In our study, we ask the students in the Gaztesare project about their stylistic choices outside that face-to-face local context, in translocal social networks such as Instagram in which the negotiation of authenticity often shifts from close and familiar interactions to translocal and even global communication. In fact, the core question in our research is whether what counts as ‘authentic’, ‘real’ and ‘credible’ among these young Basque speakers fluctuates according to Instagram’s scale-levels or not.
As Blommaert explains for other translocal and global contexts (Blommaert 2010Blommaert, Jan 2010 The Sociolinguistics of Globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. , 35), on Instagram young people jump from individual chat interactions to more collective and oftentimes translocal interactions in Timelines, and from temporally situated chat interactions to trans-temporal communication. Authenticity in these social networks needs to be understood “as developing at several different scale-levels where different orders of indexicality dominate, resulting in a polycentric ‘context’” (Blommaert 2010Blommaert, Jan 2010 The Sociolinguistics of Globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
, 42). In this polycentric context, as the analysis of the corpus of Gaztesare shows, authenticity can take many forms and values, and even the linguistic resources a young person in the sample might consider ‘authentic’ or ‘fake’ may vary significantly from one scale to another. In the Basque case we analyse in this paper, for instance, we see that while local Basque dialects are tools for self-positioning as an ‘authentic’ voice in Instagram chat; standard Batua, on the other hand, is empowering at a higher scale on Timelines, in which the same speakers use it for a more credible translocal voice.
In what follows, we will first consider the dominant contemporary values and beliefs among Basque youth associated with Basque language variation (Section 2). In Section 3, we will concentrate on the specificities of Instagram from this multi-scalar view of normativity. In Section 4, we will introduce the participants and the methods used for the collection and selection of the Gaztesare corpus. In Section 5, we will explain the most significant results stemming from the analysis of the stylistic choices of the Gaztesare students and their metalinguistic reflections. We will then conclude this work with some remarks on what counts for them as ‘authentic’ language and what are the effects of translocal mobility on that perception.
2.Authenticity and social meaning of Basque varieties among Basque youth
The historical and sociolinguistic evidence in relation to Basque suggests that, before the 1960s, its use may have been commensurate with not just geographical origin but also with social class. Basque forms were rarely brought into higher-order local play. That higher-order local space of use was occupied by Spanish and French, and Basque was often represented as an index of the past, the uneducated and the illiterate.
After the 1970s, however, the hierarchical discrepancy between Basque and Spanish/French started to reverse, particularly in the educational scaling process. This change was more pronounced in the southern provinces of the Basque Country, with the introduction of Basque into the educational system and the media as part of revitalisation planning carried out by the local, provincial and regional institutions (Urla 2012Urla, Jacqueline 2012 Reclaiming Basque. Language, Nation and Cultural Activism. Reno: University of Nevada Press.). This introduction of the formerly marginalised language into educational settings, together with a series of socio-political changes in the Basque Country, motivated the creation and the later development of standard Basque or Batua from the late 1960s on. Thereafter, and through that standard variety, Basque people started accessing many new spheres of formal use, particularly in the fields of education and the media. Batua was seen as a way to demolish the barriers between speakers of different varieties of Basque. It was also considered “fundamental, a matter of life and death” (Mitxelena 1968Mitxelena, Luis 1968 “Ortografía”. Euskera 13: 203–219.
, 203) and an urgent need as a means to unify the Basque community in order to survive. From the 1980s on, Batua has been the central axis around which Basque language revival policy has revolved in the educational system from elementary school to the university level, and it is used in the vast majority of all written production.
Due to the widespread introduction of Basque into the educational system from the 1970s onward, there has been an appreciable increase in the proportion of young people who know Basque. Today, in the Basque Autonomous Community, 71.4% of people aged between 16 and 24 are Basque speakers (Basque Government 2016Basque Government 2016 Sixth Sociolinguistic Survey. Basque Government., 7). The sociolinguistic profiles of the young community are today very diverse as regards its members’ acquisition process and cultural engagement. The emergence of new speakers in recent decades has increased the complexity of the sociolinguistic speaker typology of Basque, in particular among Basque youth. Of those, 53.9% are in the group of new Basque speakers, that is, those who have learnt the language by means other than family transmission, mostly through formal education in standard Basque (Basque Government 2016Basque Government 2016 Sixth Sociolinguistic Survey. Basque Government.
).
For decades, the local dialects or euskalkiak
11.According to Koldo Zuazo’s classification (Zuazo 2013Zuazo, Koldo 2013 The Dialects of Basque. Reno: Center for Basque Studies, University of Nevada.), currently there are five main Basque dialects or euskalkiak: the Western dialect, spoken in Biscay, Araba and most of the Deba Valley of Guipuscoa; the Central dialect, spoken in most of Guipuscoa and in some western counties of Navarre; the dialect spoken in most of Navarre; the Navarrese-Lapurdian dialect, spoken in Navarrese Lapurdi, Low Navarre, in the High Navarrese and in the northwestern area of Zuberoa; and the Zuberoan (or Souletin) dialect, spoken in most of Zuberoa and in Béarn. were perceived to lay outside academic spheres. Only since the 2000s, and in particular following a 2005 proposal by Euskaltzaindia (the Academy of the Basque Language) and the Ikastola Confederation of Basque-medium schools (Euskal Herriko Ikastolen Konfederazioa and Euskaltzaindia 2005Euskal Herriko Ikastolen Konfederazioa and Euskaltzaindia 2005 Zenbait orientabide erregistroen trataeraz. Bilbo: Euskaltzaindia.
), did Basque schools start considering the option of including the dialects in the academic system. The proposal, however, contributes to a sociolinguistic stratification effect with regard to the Basque linguistic variants: “Colloquial speech, or the speech used in informal situations, is based on the dialect or subdialect, whereas cultivated speech is based on Batua or on the cultivated speech of the dialect” (Euskal Herriko Ikastolen Konfederazioa and Euskaltzaindia 2005Euskal Herriko Ikastolen Konfederazioa and Euskaltzaindia 2005 Zenbait orientabide erregistroen trataeraz. Bilbo: Euskaltzaindia.
, 38). Alongside the school environment, the state media company EITB has also promoted this hierarchical scheme for decades. The use of the standard form has been, until very recently, associated with the voices of ‘serious’ news readers, whilst ‘non-standardness’ has been ideologically confined to the media voices of a few comedians and vox pop street interviews (Elordui 2018Elordui, Agurtzane 2018 “Vernacularisation of Media: Stylistic Change in Basque Youth Media.” Multilingua: Journal of Cross-Cultural and Interlanguage. Communication Journal 37 (6): 561–586.
, 2020 2020 “Basque in Talk Media: From the Gifting to the Performance Era.” In Linguistic Minorities in Europe, ed. by Kees de Bot, Lenore Grenoble, Pia Lane, and Unn Røyneland. Online publication. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
).
Likewise, the proposal by Euskaltzaindia and the Ikastola Confederation clearly promoted the idea of the ‘authentic’ nature of euskalkiak. In fact, the proposal came after a diagnosis of Batua use by Basque youth as ‘artificial’ and ‘non-Basque’, and local dialects were seen as the only ‘natural’ cure that could save Batua from artificiality. This has probably had an effect in the view young people have about dialects. Nowadays, euskalkiak index casualness and informality, and therefore their use builds a close bond between local dialects and authenticity in the young community, as research on languages attitudes among Basque youth demonstrate (Lantto 2015Lantto, Hanna 2015 “Code-switching in Greater Bilbao: A Bilingual Variety of Colloquial Basque.” PhD diss., University of Helsinki.; Ortega et al. 2015Ortega, Ane, Estibaliz Amorrortu, Jone Goirigolzarri, and Jacqueline Urla 2015 “Linguistic Identity among New Speakers of Basque.” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 231: 85–105. ; Urla et al. 2016Urla, Jacqueline, Estibaliz Amorrortu, Ane Ortega, and Jone Goirigolzarri 2016 “Authenticity and Linguistic Variety among New Speakers of Basque.” In Language Documentation & Conservation Special Publication 9, ed. by Vera Ferreira, and Peter Bouda, 1–12. University of Hawaii Press.
). These studies also show that among Basque youth there are new tensions around what counts as ‘authentic’ or ‘legitimate’ language, which is always linked to who are considered ‘authentic’ and ‘legitimate’ speakers. Indeed, new speakers often feel like they are not ‘authentic’ Basque speakers (Ortega et al. 2015Ortega, Ane, Estibaliz Amorrortu, Jone Goirigolzarri, and Jacqueline Urla 2015 “Linguistic Identity among New Speakers of Basque.” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 231: 85–105.
) and they do not feel legitimate when it comes to using Batua in informal contexts. Conversely, being a native speaker of Basque from some specific geographical areas of the Basque Country and speaking a local dialect is assumed to confer sociolinguistic authenticity, as Urla et al. (2018) 2018 “Basque Standardization and the New Speaker. Political Praxis and the Shifting Dynamics of Authority and Value.” In Standardizing Minority Languages. Competing Ideologies of Authority and Authenticity in the Global Periphery, ed. by Pia Lane, James Costa, and Haley De Korne, 24–46. London & New York: Routledge.
explain in detail.
3.Instagram as a multi-scalar context
Through the application of a scale metaphor, Blommaert seeks a more precise understanding of the complex ‘context’ conditions under globalized communication: “Scales need to be understood as levels or dimensions at which particular forms of normativity, patterns of language use and expectations thereof are organized” (Blommaert 2010Blommaert, Jan 2010 The Sociolinguistics of Globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. , 36). What scale does, according to Blommaert, is express an intersection of scope and value, and the value of resources in interaction is often tied to their scope of deployment, to their affordance to include or exclude interlocutors, topics and communication practices (Blommaert 2020 2020 “Sociolinguistic Scales in Retrospect.” Applied Linguistics Review 12 (3): 375–380.
, 3). Different scales organise different patterns of normativity or orders of indexicality, in Blommaert’s terms (2010Blommaert, Jan 2010 The Sociolinguistics of Globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
), that is, patterns of communicative conduct that generate recognizability in interaction.
In a polycentric context such as that of social media, the user often has to manage simultaneously various differently scoped and valued orders of indexicality (Blommaert 2020 2020 “Sociolinguistic Scales in Retrospect.” Applied Linguistics Review 12 (3): 375–380. , 5). In fact, Instagram is particularly revealing for the study of scale-jumping in normativity that also includes a constant change in the authority references considered. Instagram is a photo and video sharing social network. But Instagram photo-posts on Instagram Timeline also include short written texts in captions, in which there are comments related to the photo and sometimes hashtags (#) to help users discover both photos and also each other (Figure 1). The posts and the stories – as well as photos and short videos that expire after 24 hours – are shared publicly or with pre-approved followers, depending on whether the user’s account is public or private.