AN ALGORITHMIC STUDY OF LANGUAGE PATTERNS ON INSTAGRAM IN PAKISTAN

Abstract

The social media like Instagram has made the practice of language to become hybrid, multifaced, hybridized and multi-modal form that constitutes a combination of written, visual, and symbolic language. Instagram users in the multilingual environment of Pakistan use various linguistic alterations, which are echoed in both the global digital environment and the expression of identity. This research intends to establish linguistic changes that are done by Instagram users in Pakistan which include; abbreviations, code-switching, innovative spellings, and emojis, and also intends to determine their communicative and social roles including evasion, identity performance and humor. The corpus of 2,000 public Instagram posts by the age group 18-35 Pakistani users was analyzed with the use of algorithmic text-mining tools to use a mixed-methods design. Critical discourse analysis was also used to interpret quantitative patterns to bring out social meanings. Findings indicated that emojis/ abbreviated words were used predominantly and English- Urdu code switching was common with stylized spellings indicating the expressive intention, sense of identity and cultural hybridity. The language of Instagram in Pakistan reflects the linguistic creativity, the construction of the digital identity, and cultural adaptation which implies the local adaptation of the international digital language.