How to be authentic on Instagram: Self-presentation and language choice of Basque university students in a multi-scalar context

Abstract

This paper analyses the way young people negotiate their ‘real’ identity on Instagram, and how self-presentation can be developed by means of language choice. We draw our data from the corpus of the Gaztesare project. It contains the Instagram production of Basque university students who draw on an inventory of multilingual resources in their interactions. We consider Instagram to be a multi-scalar context in which different orders of indexicality converge (Blommaert 2010). The study analyses, from this multi-scalar perspective, the place of Basque in the language choices the students make in order to belong, to be authentic as someone or something (Varis and Wang 2011). It concludes that local Basque dialects are tools for selfpositioning as an ‘authentic’ voice in Instagram chat, but standard Batua, is empowering at a higher scale on Timelines, in which the same speakers use it for a more credible translocal voice.