ABSTRACT
Social media has provided an expedient platform for speedy information dissemination with over 1.7 billion users worldwide. With increasing access to social media such as Facebook and Twitter come both opportunities and challenges for the (re)vitalisation of languages, particularly minority languages. The UNESCO figures project that about half of the world’s languages may be endangered or die by the end of this century. This global linguistic situation has informed this study in exploring how minority languages such as Ewe (a Gbe language spoken in Ghana) are faring in the language market on platforms such as Facebook. The study involves analyses of posts from eight selected Ewe-focused groups on Facebook. The thematic areas of the study include sociocultural features such as the photographic representation of the dress codes of the Ewe people, food, and cultural ornaments. Linguistic features such as the adaptation of Ewe fonts, and bilingual practices such as codeswitching (CS) and translanguaging on the social media pages are explored.
