Secondary migrations and multilingual digital communication

From a sociological point of view, globalisation has made many aspects of human life, particularly interaction and communication, far from uniform. Due to its very nature, the new and constantly renewed globalised sociolinguistic environment is extremely complex, varied, and sometimes even chaotic, but it is perhaps for this very reason an incredibly interesting and fascinating field of academic research. The aim of this research is to describe the complexity, diversity, and creativity of everyday communication practices and repertoires in heterogeneous multilingual settings, more precisely in contexts of secondary migrations and via digital communication media. The research will be focussed on Internet Mediated Communication (IMC), as online communication is extremely widespread, spontaneous, easily accessed, and because it plays a predominant role in the creation and maintenance of both local and translocal communities. The work is divided into three parts. The first two will provide a theoretical and a contextual overview, while the third will consist of a qualitative analysis of online multilingualism in two case studies. The aim of the theoretical and contextual overviews is not only to offer some reliable sources to support the following data analysis, but also to provide a structured analytical framework that will be functional to the description of the following phenomena. The third and last chapter will consist of the actual qualitative analysis of two case studies. The participants, two young women from Ghana and Pakistan, both living in contexts of secondary migration, agreed to share some instances of their communicative practices by participating to interviews, providing screenshots of a selection of written conversations and recordings of oral interactions, and also providing screenshots of a selection of posts uploaded on social networking platforms. These instances of communication show, among others, how IMC becomes a way of self-affirmation and the textual and semiotic features of every communicative act cooperate in the creation, transformation and consolidation of the users' identities and networks. The gathered data also shows how the participants use all their linguistic and semiotic repertoires, as well as medium-specific repertoires, to enable and boost mutual understanding, leading to recurring phenomena such as translanguaging, indexicality as meaning-making element and an overall freedom in the use of non-standard punctuation, capitalisation and spelling rules.