Language Choice in Tajikistan’s Digital Public Spaces: An Analysis of Multilingual Practices by Commenters on Public Facebook Pages

Abstract

Digital public spaces provide forums for complex communication and meaning making processes among unfamiliar interactants. Language choice and practices in digital text-based environments within known social circles have been studied and shown to be shaped by knowledge of others in the space, whereas relatively less attention has been given to the ways that posts are constructed in digital public spaces, despite their growing importance and influence. This study employs the framework of translanguaging and tools of digital conversation analysis to analyze the coordination of linguistic and paralinguistic resources in the multilingual context of public Facebook news page comments related to the highly multilingual country of Tajikistan. The results show considerable variety of visual resources and language mixing at every level between Tajik and Russian with considerably less use of Arabic. The data also reinforce linguistic trends observed in Tajikistan with Russian generally used as a prestige language, while Tajik is used for interpersonal affiliation. The lack of representation of other languages spoken in Tajikistan emphasizes the important role of these languages in the context. This study provides insight into the multilingual repertoire and practices of Tajikistan, but more specifically, the ways in which it is enacted in digital public spaces.