The linguistic characteristics and semiotic functions of algerian students' facebook posts

Abstract EN

This paper investigates the Algerian youth's languaging via the digital social platform Facebook to identify linguistic features and semiotic functions of the digital communication of this particular social group.

Facebook, due to its size and popularity, is largely argued by sociolinguists to be a rich context for language investigation and which linguists today cannot deny to be very impactful on language variation.

The youths are the main vehicle of language change and main users of technology; thus, youths' interaction via social digital network can yield rich data about new linguistic and semiotic features which in turn can inform about a new linguistic identity of the young generation and its ideological implication in society.

The corpus to this investigation are 180 Facebook posts and comments in addition to data generated from focus group interviews with university students as regards some linguistic characteristics related to their Facebook language.

The use of both on-line and off-line data offers the possibility to interpret virtual data from a concrete reality.

The Facebook languaging of the youths is analysed from both variationist and interactionist sociolinguistic and also semiotic perspectives.

This study reveals that the youths are inventive, creative, and positive; they also vary codes according to different social settings and rely heavily on connotative meanings and satires to express thoughts.