DIGITAL MULTILINGUALISM AND THE EXPERIENCE OF IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION: A GROUNDED THEORY STUDY

Abstract

The conceptualization of multilingualism and multilingual identity in Pakistan has always remained a challenge and the emergence of multilingual practices in the digital social spaces has posed an added complexity to this challenge. In context of Pakistan, an excessive and unavoidable scholarly focus on language politics and their implications for the identity construction processes has halted the emergence of alternative perspectives to look at the multilingual phenomenon and imagining multilingual identity differently. This phenomenon, thus, requires a fresh scholarly focus for its explication in relation to the digital space. In order to do that, this study adopts a qualitative mode of inquiry and adheres to the constructivist grounded theory method as its analytical framework. It opts for online observation and interviews as data collection tools and collects data from faculty members belonging to Pakistani HEIs with different ethnic backgrounds. It analyzes the subjectivist perspectives of these individuals for an in-depth understanding of their experiences in relation to the phenomenon under study. The findings of the study comprise three thematic categories including living ethnicity through multilingual practices, addressing linguistic marginalization and revitalization of local languages, and re-envisioning ethno-linguistic differences in digital multilingual ecology. The findings on one hand contribute in highlighting the problematic nature of rigid conceptualizations of multilingual identity in context of Pakistan. On the other hand, they offer a revisionist perspective to look at languages as shared linguistic resources for identity construction instead of being ideologically confining abstract systems which exacerbate the language based identity conflicts amongst Pakistani people.