VIRTUAL LINGUISTIC LANDSCAPE: ARENA OF LANGUAGE AND IDENTITY CONTESTATION
Keywords:
Virtual Linguistic Landscape, identity, language contestation, multimodality, North SumatraAbstract
This study aims to analyze the Virtual Linguistic Landscape (VLL) as an arena of language and identity contestation, focusing on two online communities in North Sumatra: the official government social media account and a local cultural community. A qualitative approach with a multimodal case study design was employed, involving online participant observation, content analysis, and semi-structured interviews with key participants. The findings reveal a clear divergence in orientation: the government primarily uses Indonesian (72%) and English (22%) for formal and globalization purposes, while the cultural community predominantly features local languages (67%) as symbols of pride and cultural resistance. Multimodal analysis indicates that government accounts emphasize official infographics and tourism promotion, whereas cultural communities creatively utilize memes, poetry, and folklore to reinforce identity. These results highlight that the digital sphere serves not only as a medium of communication but also as an ideological arena where language power and identity are negotiated. The study contributes theoretically to the development of digital linguistic landscape research and offers practical implications for government policies to better accommodate local languages in virtual spaces
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