Commercialising regional or minority languages: associations with Low German in Instagram posts

Abstract

<p>This paper focuses on how associations with the Low German regional language are depicted in commercial posts on Instagram. Previous studies on offline domains show that regional and minority languages are increasingly commodified. At the same time, e-commerce plays an important role in retail. However, until now, comparably little attention has been paid to the commercial use of regional and minority languages online. This paper analyses what commercial Instagrammers associate Low German with and how they employ these associations for marketing in their posts. A multimodal corpus of commercial Instagram posts was compiled using different Low German related hashtags, consisting of 1,157 posts by 86 Instagrammers. The data were analysed using a mixed-method approach combining qualitative and quantitative analysis and employing methods of Qualitative Content Analysis and multimodal research. This paper shows that the commercial Instagrammers in the study deliberately combine a limited and rather conservative and stereotypical repertoire of associations with Low German circulating and strengthening common ideas of the language to promote their products. The Instagrammers reinforce the association of Low German with the seaside, especially, in their posts, also presenting their products in idyllic sceneries.<br></p>