Translanguaging in self-praise on Chinese social media

Abstract Self-praise is very common on social media, and various translanguaging strategies are often used by internet users in online communication. Most of the existing studies on self-praise have centered on strategies for self-praise, ignoring the multimodal communication styles involved. On the other hand, although translanguaging has attracted significant research attention in linguistics and multilingual education, few studies have explored translanguaging in a specific speech act. Therefore, this study investigates the translanguaging practices involved in self-praising in Chinese netizens’ social media by analyzing 300 Chinese microblog posts containing self-praise. The results indicate that there are three major categories of translanguaging strategies in self-praise in microblogs, namely multimodal, multilingual and multi-semiotic resources, with various sub-strategies involved in each category. The study also discusses the possible factors motivating Chinese netizens to deploy translanguaging practices to self-praise on social media. This study contributes to the body of research on translanguaging pragmatics in social media communication.