Abstract
YouTube, Instagram and TikTok are among the most popular audiovisual social media platforms worldwide (see Statista 2023). Memetic trends and challenges spread from TikTok in particular, with videos sometimes achieving an immense reach (cf. e.g. Zulli & Zulli 2022). High-reach accounts are dedicated to a wide range of topics, including the thematisation of multilingualism as a genre in its own right.
The presentation focuses on analysing videos in which producers stage their own multilingualism and thus present themselves as people who speak more than one language. The central questions are: Which sign modalities do producers use to stage multilingualism? To what extent are the individual languages linked to specific identities? How does the use of these sign modalities influence the entertainment quality and thus the reach?
A qualitative, multimodal analysis (Wildfeuer et al. 2020) including platform-specific affordances (boyd 2014) is used to show which sign modalities producers use to represent the individual languages and associated identities in their productions.
Sources
boyd, danah (2014): It's complicated: the social lives of networked teens. Yale: Yale University Press.
Statista (2023): Ranking of the largest social networks and messengers by number of users in January 2023. https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/181086/umfrage/die-weltweit-groessten-social-networks-nach-anzahl-der-user/ [10/12/2023]
Wildfeuer, Janina/Bateman, John A. & Hiippala, Tuomo (2020): Multimodality: foundations, research and analysis - a problem-oriented introduction (= De Gruyter Studium). Berlin ; Boston: Walter de Gruyter.
Zulli, Diana & Zulli, David J. (2022): "Extending the Internet meme: Conceptualising technological mimesis and imitation publics on the TikTok platform". New Media & Society 24: 8, 1872-1890. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820983603.
