The impact of social media in the sociolinguistic practices of the peripheral post-socialist contexts

ABSTRACT

This article examines the impact of social media on the linguistic and communicative practices in post-socialist countries, such as Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, and Mongolia – the contexts very much under-represented in the discussion of translingualism. Relocalisation of social media-based linguistic resources in the languages used in these peripheral countries represents linguistically innovative practice, which entails orthographic, morphosyntactic, and phonologic adaptation of Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube labels, as well as their semantic reformulation in Bosnian, Serbian, and Mongolian resources. Social media-oriented linguistic terminologies are being adapted to the Cyrillic alphabet in Serbian and Mongolian and adopt grammatical features of the Bosnian variety. The original forms in social media are manipulated by social media users to serve their own ethos and local sociolinguistic practices. As a result, new forms of languages and linguistic meanings are created.

KEYWORDS:

• Relocalisation
• social media
• peripheral languages
• Bosnia and Herzegovina
• Serbia
• Mongolia

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Social media profile names of all users retrieved in these extracts are pseudonyms, and profile picture windows were all removed to protect anonymity. All local texts were translated from the local languages into English by the researchers.

Additional information

Funding

This work was also supported by the Australian Research Council (ARC) [grant number DE180100118] and (6282) Curtin University Humanities/Curtin International Postgraduate Research Scholarship (CIPRS).