Heteroglossic management in Instagram: Emerging ideological dynamics among Basque youth

Abstract

In this paper, I explore the monolingual and polylingual stylistic behaviors on Instagram among Basque native young people within the project Gaztesare. By means of an in-depth qualitative study, I try to explain in which sense such monolingual and polylingual behaviors or styles are socially significant signs of difference (Gal & Irvine, 2019). The study reveals that those styles are organized in an axis of differentiation (Gal, 2016; Gal & Irvine, 2019) that takes the contrasting monolingual and polylingual styles as iconic representations linked to different personhoods or person-types. The participants of the study consider them tools to shape and create contrasting voices that interilluminate each other in different contexts on Instagram. The study also informs about new ideological dynamics among these young people. In fact, the most innovative results in this study are about the enregisterment of the polylingual style I study. It is becoming an exclusive in-group talk, and it is acquiring stereotypic indexical values related to informality. It is, moreover, being naturalized as a “social network speech” with which young people recreate multiple multicultural and playful voices.