Managing identity in football communities on Facebook: Language preference and language mixing strategies

Abstract

In this article, we examine language choice and code-switching in two different social media multilingual communities: comments posted on the official Facebook pages of the most important football clubs in Cameroon and Spain. In these two cases, non-standardised languages like indigenous Cameroonian languages or “minority” languages like Catalan have to compete with other languages. By means of a quantitative and Computer-mediated Communication Discourse Analysis (CMCDA), our results show that translingual written exchanges are frequently adopted and serve to establish local and global identities in these highly multilingual environments. Specifically, the results of this case study demonstrate that language mixing strategies are vital to create distinct in-group language style and alignment. However, the article concludes that multilingual interactions are constructed differently by the two communities. The language mixing strategies in the Cameroonian comments are more varied and provide richer examples of language mixing phenomena than the texts from the Spanish clubs. We argue that this is likely because language mixing and lexical creativity are deeply embedded in Cameroon's daily communicative practices.