ABSTRACT
English has permeated, mixed, and alternated with Finnish in domains such as business, education, popular culture, or leisure-time activities. The Finns’ collectively increased competence in English has also helped create spaces for ways of using English as a source of collective humor and mockery, which have not been researched extensively to date. To illustrate this phenomenon, the aim of this chapter is to conceptualize and analyze ways in which particular usages of English appear as sources of humor and jokes in digital social media, particularly in two Finland-based football discussion forums. The main foci of this paper are: 1) uses of styles of English in digital discourse contexts; 2) metapragmatic (metalinguistic) discussions and commentaries about such uses; 3) deliberate adaptations and appropriations of non-standard (“bad”) English for purposes of humor and mockery; and 4) the position of such English(es) in a broader multilingual and multimodal constellation of semiotic communicative resources in digital media.
