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Globalization, localization, and post-1997 socio-political change has jointly reshaped Hong Kong’s linguistic ecology, yet little qualitative work has examined how young Hongkongers negotiate these tensions on image-centred platforms such as Instagram. To address this gap, this qualitive multimodal study explores how Hong Kong youth negotiate a “glocal” identity on Instagram through the strategic interplay of Cantonese and English languages and multimodal symbols (emojis, hashtags, images) to balance the inheritance of local culture, the demands of globalization, and the resistance to cultural homogenization. Focusing on two contrasting domains: leisure life (e.g., diet and entertainment) and academic life (e.g., exam pressure and graduation ceremonies), the study employs critical discourse analysis and multimodal social semiotics methods to analyze 15 purposefully selected posts by Hong Kong youth users. The findings reveal that in leisure contexts, Cantonese–English translanguaging innovates local symbols through cultural translation, reinforcing local belonging. In academic contexts, English terms internalize global academic hegemony, while Cantonese emotional expression and humorous symbols deconstruct its oppressiveness. Users systematically avoid Mandarin and strategically deploy the international legitimacy of English and the local authenticity of Cantonese to negotiate the dual pressures of mainland cultural infiltration and global academic norms. The study offers a fine-grained qualitative insight that complements existing large-scale work on Hong Kong digital multilingualism, and indicates that translanguaging is not merely a communicative tool but a micro-political practice of identity negotiation, providing a new perspective for digital identity work in multilingual societies.
Zikai Qiu (Mon,) studied this question.