The Sociolinguistics of Digital Identity: Digital Persona, Performance and Identity in Mediated Spaces

Abstract

In the physical world, sociolinguistic identity is often signaled through what Goffman (1959) termed as sign-vehicles; the clothes we wear, our posture, and our physical surroundings. In the digital landscape, these physical markers are replaced by the Profile. The profile serves as a curated front stage, a semiotic space where the user strategically selects linguistic and visual tokens to signal belonging to specific social categories