“Hello everybody”: when online styles go offline

Abstract

Abstract Young people in Denmark spend considerable time on social media platforms such as TikTok and YouTube, engaging with vlogs, tutorials, and unboxing videos that are often in English. Drawing on a five-month ethnographic study of 20 high school students (aged 15–17) in the Copenhagen area of Denmark and a dataset combining group interviews, language portraits, and self-recordings of face-to-face interactions, this article examines how semiotic styles in English that are associated with particular social media genres become embedded in young people’s everyday communication. The analysis shows that participants draw on resources from online English-language genres to style offline activities and interactions. The article argues that these practices shape young people’s social worlds and everyday interactions by circulating not only English linguistic resources but also consumerist logics and forms of self-presentation inherent to certain social media genres. More broadly, the findings suggest that the participants’ styling practices reflect ongoing sociolinguistic change toward the use of everyday English in Denmark, driven by mediatization.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 2026 · DOI ↗