Marking Identity through Language in Social Media Discourse by Chuka University Students

Abstract

Interaction via social media has gained popularity owing to the technological advancements that have affected the manner in which people communicate in the contemporary world. This paper is geared towards shedding light on the ways in which language is exploited by the University students to mark their identities through language in their social media discourse. Studies on social media discourse have largely been done in monolingual situations where texts written in one/single language have been analyzed. It was, therefore, necessary to carry out a study in multilingual situation where texts written in English, Kiswahili, Sheng (a Kenyan Pidgin) and local languages are analyzed. The study employed social identity theory in analyzing the data. Descriptive research design and qualitative technique were employed for data analysis. Both snowball and purposive sampling procedures were used. The study reveals that students mark their identities by converging in their messages through the use of special jargon, multimodality, and, simple syntactic structures. It was concluded that the students mark their identities by using language in a similar manner.