Enregistering emojis in online socialization: linguaculturally diverse university students’ affective translingual practices

ABSTRACT

This article examines linguaculturally diverse university students’ affective translingual practices of using emojis and languages in computer-mediated communication. Research studies have investigated the sociopragmatic uses of emojis from the perspectives of social semiotics, language socialisation, and translingual practices. This study expands on these perspectives and further adopts enregisterment as a conceptual framework to explore the emergence of emoji variations and other affective expressions in online discussions about news and social media content. The primary data were collected from written discourses on Facebook across 8 weeks and through follow-up data-focused interviews. The results present the multilingual participants’ metapragmatic commentaries on particular uses of face emojis in relation to emotive discourses, enregistered voices, and embodied contextualisation. The results exemplify the multimodal enregisterment of affective translingual practices through which emoji users’ playful performances can be recognised and enacted in online socialisation.

KEYWORDS:

• Affect
• computer-mediated communication
• emoji
• enregisterment
• language socialisation
• translanguaging

Acknowledgments

This study is part of a larger research project funded by the Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan (MOST109-2410-H-008-048). I would like to thank Chien-Hui Wen, Yun-Chu Huang, Pei-Ling Liu, and Jui-Ting Hsueh for their assistance in data collection. I am also grateful for the editors and reviewers of this journal for their insightful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan.