ELF and sign-making practices on YouTube: between globalization and specificities

As is well-known, the leading video-sharing website YouTube gives easy access to cross-boundary communication. Furthermore, the recently introduced ‘video-response’ option enables videobloggers to interact through videos addressing one another, thus building communication threads made of videos. Understandably, English is the privileged language in these international video threads; yet language is only part of a wide and diversified range of resources employed in video-interaction, since gestures, facial expressions, sound and music, animations, drawings, photos, and filmed images can all be deployed in videos. Stemming from the idea that international communication is enabled by shared semiotic practices which include, but are not limited to, the use of a lingua franca based on English (Jenkins, 2000, 2003; Seidlhofer, 2001), the present chapter carries out a multimodal analysis (Kress / van Leeuwen, 2006) on one of the largest video threads currently on YouTube. By endorsing a social semiotic perspective (Hodge / Kress, 1988), the analysis investigates: 1. how cultural specificities and differences are communicated worldwide by means of shared resources – language included – and, 2. how signs – spread ‘globally’ from prestigious centres – are developed specifically in a given semiotic space. Within this broad aim, the analysis also discusses the specific variety of international English which is ingrained in the linguistic practices of the thread, how these practices develop according to the participants’ needs, and the extent to which language favours (or hinders) international participation in video-interaction. Ultimately, the analysis shows that ELF can be considered as a part of a wider shared repertoire enabling international communication. It also testifies to the fact that language contact and language creativity are part of the broader phenomenon of semiotic contact and creativity, through which both locally- and globally-originated signs are adopted, transformed, and shared by the international participants in a specific space.