Multilingual repertoires and the relocalization of manga in digital media

•People perform local, global and glocal identities with multilingual repertoires.•Sociolinguistic online ethnography gives access to the participants׳ interpretations.•An analysis of multilingual repertoires on Facebook with an ethnographic approach.

The aim of this study is to analyze multilingual repertoires of young adolescents and the relocalization of manga on Facebook. The focal points of our analysis are: how young adolescents relocalize manga in digital media, the multilingual repertoires these adolescents use in the relocalization of manga, and the manner in which the relocalization of manga and the multilingual repertoires in digital media contribute to indexing the identity of these adolescents.The results show that digital media opens up for and encourages dialogue through which the identity performances of young adolescents are invigorated. Through their repertoires, the adolescents perform local, global and glocal identities that reflect superdiverse conditions. The participants׳ choice of, e.g., Japanese screen names highlights their indexing of identities in which local and global aspects are blended and where Japanese aspects are highlighted, whereas other heritage cultures are backgrounded. From the adolescents׳ engagement in a global and transnational manga culture, we learn that, in superdiverse conditions, global transcultural flows can affect the lives of adolescents to the extent that these become a central part of their identity performance.In the article, we propose a sociolinguistic online ethnography approach in which we combine (socio)linguistic ethnography with online ethnography. The study shows how the ethnographic data supports, deepens and nuances the analysis. Sociolinguistic online ethnography thus offers a lens through which we as researchers can access not only multilingual repertoires per se but also the participants׳ voices and interpretations.