Multimodal Communicative Practices in Filipino Facebook Discourse: Linguistic Creativity, Relational Work and Digital Meaning-making

Social media platforms like Facebook have become key spaces for dynamic, multimodal communication, where users combine text, images, emojis, and other resources to construct meaning. In Filipino digital discourse, these practices reflect rich linguistic creativity and relational work, shaping how identity, social interaction, and meaning are negotiated online. This study examines the multimodal communicative practices of Filipino Facebook users, focusing on how linguistic and non-linguistic resources interact to construct meaning in computer-mediated discourse. Drawing on a corpus of 315 anonymized expressions from publicly accessible Facebook posts, the study employs a qualitative discourse-analytic approach grounded in multimodal discourse analysis and relational work theory. Methodological rigor is enhanced through brief interpretive interviews for communicative validation and expert linguistic review by two Filipino language scholars. The analysis identifies key linguistic features, including word-formation processes (blending, clipping, affixation, reduplication), sound-based expressions (interjections, letter elongation, onomatopoeia), non-standard orthography, and creative colloquial forms such as reverse spelling (sakalam from malakas). These linguistic resources co-occur with non-linguistic elements such as emojis, emoticons, GIFs, stickers, and images. Together, these multimodal resources perform expressive, phatic, humorous, and affiliative functions that support emotional clarity, relational work, and interactional efficiency in text-based digital environments. The findings demonstrate how Filipino users mobilize culturally specific multimodal repertoires, exemplified by emoji-anchored code-mixing (e.g., Favorite ko yan) and affectively charged respellings, to manage affect and social alignment in everyday digital interaction. By focusing on Filipino Facebook discourse, this study contributes to computer-mediated communication research by highlighting the culturally situated nature of multimodal meaning-making and challenging Anglocentric assumptions in digital discourse studies. The findings also offer implications for digital literacy education in multilingual Southeast Asian contexts.