Egyptians’ Construction of National Affiliation on Social Media: A Corpus-based Study

In April 2021, Egypt organised a historic parade ‘The Pharaohs’ Golden Parade’, aiming to revive the tourism sector after encountering a series of crises. In response, some Egyptians wrote and shared posts in English on social media platforms, communicating their views regarding the execution of the parade. This study aims to identify the Egyptian post-writers’ attitudes toward the parade and to reveal how they constructed their national identity on social media. In December 2021, three hundred forty-two public posts, written in English, were collected from three social media platforms: LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook, and data was uploaded to the Sketch Engine programme. A triangulation method of analysis was conducted, involving the application of a corpus-based analysis and the adaptation of two approaches, the Ideation-Attitude approach (Knight, 2010) and the Constructive & Perpetuation Strategies of National Identity (Wodak et al., 2009). The findings indicated the frequent use of the hashtag #GoldenParade, keywords, such as PARADE and EGYPT, and pronouns, such as IT, I, and WE. The identified keywords were coupled with positive verbs, adjectives, and adverbs that showcased the Egyptians’ positive attitudes toward the parade. Moreover, the coupling of Ideation-Attitude revealed the use of diverse identity markers that reinforced the Egyptians’ construction of national identity. Therefore, using common hashtags and similar linguistic resources on three social media platforms emphasized the Egyptians’ construction and perpetuation of national ambient identity/affiliation.