U Ok Hun?: The digital commodification of white woman style

Sociolinguistic research has increasingly explored the ways in which semiotic features are variably recruited to stylistically perform enregistered social personae. In this paper, I add to this body of work by exploring the emergence of a stereotypically feminine style and persona that is widespread in British social media. Specifically, I examine the prevalence of non-standard spellings (e.g., <dallyn> darling, <gawjus> gorgeous), discourse features (e.g., hun, babe, u ok hun?), and characterological tropes (e.g., the life motto ‘live, love, laugh’) as indexical representations of a particular type of classed, gendered, and ethnic identity in a corpus of Instagram memes. I demonstrate that these features have become enregistered as a characterological figure of a British working-class White woman—the Hun—that is stylistically deployed as a digital commodity register. Concluding, I emphasise the need for research to engage more fully with stylisation and commodification in social and digital media interaction.