Birthday, Culture, and Social Media

Abstract

Life in the modern age is dominated by social media. What used to be very much a private affair, like birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, etc., is now celebrated in front of oftentimes the whole world, and not infrequently, through the medium of the language that is not our own.

The object of investigation in the present paper is the speech act of birthday wish sent to someone via Facebook. The analysis demonstrates that although the speech act has a universal aim – to show interest in another person and make them feel good, and although in many cases the language of conveying wishes, beside the native tongues, is the same, this notably being English, the lingua franca of contemporary world, the way the wish is expressed may differ markedly from culture to culture, thereby showing the underlying cultural values and norms of the users and of their native language use. The socio-pragmatic analysis presented here focuses on posts collected from personal profiles of British, Polish, Indian, and Armenian users, and investigates, among others, the choice of language, the formulaic vs. personalised character of the wish, and the character of strategies that make the wishes more personally oriented, with the aim to demonstrate visible differences across cultures regarding the way birthday wishes are phrased.