Writing with an Accent: Orthographic Practice, Emblems, and Traces on Facebook

Abstract

This article considers writing practices on Facebook and examines the use of otherwise stigmatized dialect features on social network sites. Whereas youth from Kenya's Lamu Archipelago avoid Swahili dialects in spoken interaction, they infuse digital exchanges with phonological qualities associated with these vernaculars. I propose that such acts of “writing with an accent,” and particularly orthographic signs' ambiguous status as either unintended traces of grassroots literacy or strategic emblems of identity enable a simultaneous appeal to local rootedness and a transcendence of that rootedness. Analyzing the strategic indeterminacy of such orthographic “accents” provides insight in the renegotiations of belonging that social media enable.