Exploring the use of english in instagram and its influence on the user’s identity

Abstract

English has been used widely in almost all international forums. In line with the rapid use of social media, in this case Instagram, English is also widely used as the language of self-expression by most of its users, both native and non-native speakers. At least, this is what happened in Indonesia. Most of Indonesian Instagram users, especially youth, use English to write their caption. This phenomenon is important to explore since there is a belief that by actively using a foreign language, it will reduce the sense of nationality within oneself, and even it will lead to the loss of one’s identity. Identity today becomes a very important issue since it shows the sense of belonging of oneself in his/her social interaction. The thing is that the social interaction model in social media is much more complex than the interaction model in the real life. In social media, most of the users do not merely want to show who they really are. They tend to have certain motive on how they can be accepted and appreciated by other users. In other words, they want to be the subject of attention instead of being themselves. Therefore, the concept of identity becomes blurred. Based on the previous description, through the direct observation method, this research aims to seek whether the use of English influences the identity of Indonesian users.

The Use of English on Instagram Captions: A Case Study in Camera Indonesia Photography Community

“…In fact, it correlated with the low frequency of reading English literature since their exposure of English was more on watching YouTube video. However, the purpose of writing caption in English contradicts with the claim of Nurhantoro and Wulandari (2017) stated that writing caption in English was a media to interact with native speaker, this study suggested that the main purpose of writing caption in English was more on the self-expression. The last aspect to be studied was the effectiveness of the caption toward the photo work uploaded.…”

“…She found that the writing of captions needs to be based on the existence of critical and creative thinking so that the images and writing will be connected. Another research by Nurhantoro and Wulandari (2017) found out 24% from 100 respondents stated that interacting with the native speakers using English through Instagram will influence the users' pride and it has the possibility to lead them to regard western culture superior than theirs. While Amirudin and Triyono (2018) stated that caption is deeply incorporated with communicative intentions of its users implicitly or explicitly which is mostly addressed to others.…”

Depicting #fatherhood involvement on Instagram: Caregiving, affection, and stimulation

“…We queried Instagram for hashtags including the word "father" and a set of suggestions were returned. The choice to search expressions in English was due to its being the typical language used for most users (Nurhantoro & Wulandari, 2017;Jorge, 2019). Among the top results were expressions like #fathersday, #fatherandson or #fatherdaughter.…”

Linguistic Analysis of Insta, Twit Posts and LJ Blogs in the Context of Their Functions (Based on the Russian Language)

“…[26] Although the online services under study have taken the scientist attention since their inception, a review of literature sources showed that hypertext analysis was mainly based on the English language material. [27,28] However, since most users are non-English speakers, the issue of language interaction in a globalizing world is of interest. One of the first papers analyzing the place of other languages in the blogsphere was the study by Herring et al [1] At the same time, there is not enough data to determine the specifics of the language of posts and blogs based on the Russian language.…”