Code switching in a humorous discourse of a multilingual network community

Abstract

The paper is devoted to the discourse of multilingual online communities, with the Belarusian language and mixed Belarusian-Russian speech (trasianka) used to create humorous situations. The problem of involvement of different Belarusian language idioms on the Internet is discussed. In addition, the code preferences and code-switching in the publications and comments of the participants of the communities are analyzed, and the interrelation between code and genre-discursive characteristics of messages is identified. Messages that form the humorous culture of the online communities concerned are classified into two types based on the writer’s intention: informative and phatic. Phatic messages create a playful emotional back-ground, provide integration of the community members, and are an effective way to maintain intragroup solidarity relying on a shared sense of humor. Members of the online community publish informative messages to ironically interpret, ridicule, and negatively assess events in the life of Belarusian society. It has been established that informative and phatic types of messages in a discourse of “humorous” online communities are marked through different language codes. When creating phatic messages in the online community, users prefer the Belarusian literary language. Informative messages are formed by means of a network version of the mixed Belarusian-Russian speech with intentionally distorted language code, demonstrative marginalization of a speech stream, a LOL trasianka. Such language coding provides the members of online communities with a scenario signal and allows them to prevent the conflicts that could result from disagreement with the proposed humorous situation development strategy.