Translanguaging and Identity Construction in Pakistani YouTube Interviews: A Multimodal Discourse Analysis

Abstract

Despite the fact that Pakistani YouTube has a significant ecology of long-form interview programming, there has been a lack of work on the sociolinguistics of Pakistani multilingual digital practice that considers extended spoken interaction – written posts, questionnaires, and short-form content. This study investigates Urdu–English resources used by the speakers in their interviews on YouTube in Pakistan and analyzes the way these resources are used for meaning-making and how this practice helps in the construction of identity. The design is of a qualitative and interpretative type. Five interviews were purposively selected from three sources of publicly available material, and coded transcripts were used, with the English lexical items that occurred only in the Urdu line considered as evidence of code-mixed speech and the English that occurred only in the accompanying translation not being included in the linguistic analysis. This produced a highly analytic corpus of code-mixing in four interviews, while the fifth interview was used only in a contextual manner. The twelve extracts were analyzed using a translanguaging approach as well as Bucholtz and Hall's identity theory and a multimodal reading of the transcripts that focuses on what they do and do not preserve. These findings reveal four recurrent functions of English: conceptual and historiographic register anchoring (English is used to carry technical and analytical vocabulary, independent of domain); metapragmatic reflexivity in English (reflexivity on English itself); moral and evaluative framing of delicate content (English is used to frame the content as good or bad, moral or immoral); and biographical and institutional self-positioning (English can be used to position the author or the institution whose voice the author speaks). No easy dichotomy of English as prestige and Urdu as authenticity emerged as indexical values fluctuated from one moment to the next in the same interview. The spread of clause-level English code-mixing into a colonial-historiography interview, a discourse space far from the technology and educational contexts traditionally explored, implies that register anchoring is not unique to analyses of a single professional context but is a more general practice with respect to the analytical register.