Vernacular infrastructuring: Rethinking linguistic agency of minority‐language speakers in multilingual digital environment

Abstract This article introduces the concept of vernacular infrastructuring to examine how speakers of minoritized languages navigate multilingual digital environments. Building on notion of vernacular creativity and extending insights from linguistic anthropology, I conceptualize infrastructuring as the everyday negotiation of institutional norms, platform logics, and user practices that structure linguistic visibility. Drawing on the case of Nanti Kita Sambat tentang Hari Ini (NKSTHI), a popular Instagram and X account that reimagines the Javanese speech genre sambat (“to complain”), I show how users creatively mobilize Javanese to perform cultural intimacy while tactically responding to algorithmic imaginaries. I argue that vernacular infrastructuring operates through three entangled layers: institutional infrastructures (historical hierarchies of language policy and media), perceived platform infrastructures (folk theories and algorithmic imaginaries), and user practices (stylization, code‐mixing, and affective design). Through this layered analysis, the paper demonstrates that vernacular practices are not merely expressive but infrastructurally strategic forms of discursive value work, referring to the speakers' reflexivity to assign and contest linguistic value. By foregrounding the agentive tactics of minoritized users, vernacular infrastructuring contributes to ongoing debates in linguistic anthropology on language, media, and infrastructure, showing how digital platforms actively participate in the revaluation of linguistic diversity.