Memes, Emojis, and Text: The Semiotics of Differentiation in Sri Lankan Tamil Digital Publics

This article draws on Judith T. Irvine’s theorizing of the semiotic processes of differentiation to investigate how Sri Lankan Tamils and Muslims configure similarity and difference in multimodal social media interactions. I analyze Facebook discussions around memes of Tamil-language blunders in trilingual public signs, which are widely taken to represent the incomplete implementation of Tamil as a co-official language. Insider status in groups is not contingent on code use, but on expressing particular alignments toward the memes as tokens of a type. By virtue of their metapragmatic ambiguity, emojis are powerful in enabling participants to create shared affective stances around the memes, but they are also useful in demarcating difference between Tamil speakers and Sinhalas. I contribute to studies of social media communication by examining how different linguistic and non-linguistic forms of expression are used to delineate transnational Tamil digital publics.