Digital multilingual identity: insights from Indonesian multilingual EFL students’ identity construction on Instagram

Abstract

This study proposes the concept of Digital Multilingual Identity (DMI) to explore how multilingual learners navigate their multilingual capacity and employ different communication forms to articulate their identities, negotiate social relationships, and interact with varied audiences on Instagram. The participants are four Indonesian multilingual EFL college students from a private university in West Java, Indonesia. To investigate the construction of DMI in the students’ Instagram posts, this study draws upon frameworks for both multimodal and multilingual identity analysis. The data collection adopts an online ethnography method, comprising 156 Instagram posts posted from 2021 to 2023. The findings reveal that the students strategically utilized linguistic resources (e.g., language choice, translingual practices, and multimodal modes) and visual resources (e.g., images, emojis, and attires) to project the three ideal identities (i.e., spatial, relational, and functional) and also overlapping among the three identities. We argue that DMI enhances multilingual learners’ analytical and critical reasoning abilities in comprehending multimodal texts, expands their multimodal communicative repertoire, and raises their proficiency in using multiple resources for meaning-making. Further investigation into DMI can improve comprehension of the interactions between multilingual students and interlocutors from various linguistic backgrounds, as well as the strategies employed in multimodal meaning-making.