Communicative Repertoires and Cultural Identity Construction in a Super Diverse Social Networking Space of Students of the National University of Lesotho

Abstract

The paper examines communicative repertoires and cultural identity construction among students of the National University of Lesotho in the social media space. The paper argues that culture and cultural identity on social media are a complex. Specifically, the studies the manner and ways in which the students deployed communicative repertoires on social media to index their individual and collective identities. Cultural convergence and divergence together with hybridity provides a solid foundation on which the paper is anchored. The chapter combines Fishman (1965, 1972) conceptualisation of domain and Halliday and Hassan’s (1976) approach to discourse analysis as methods for analysing the data. The study is qualitative. In all, 40 students participated in the study. Three groups of 10 students took part in different focus group discussions while ten students were interviewed. The research also analysed screen shots of the students’ posts, comments and communication on various social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp to find out how they pointed to the students’ individual and collective identities. The paper concludes that on social media culture and cultural identity can take many forms and that a “glocalised” linguistic community is a community where both the local and global linguistic resources available to a community are deployed for a variety of communicative purposes. These communicative repertoires employed on social media mark out the individual and collective identity of the of the students.