Categorisation and the negotiation of similarity and difference: Identity constriction in expatriate blogs

Expatriates are individuals who have moved abroad and settled into a new sociocultural environment. Many keep a personal blog, in which they reflect on their experiences and in the process engage in identity construction. Whilst online directories list a multitude of expatriate blogs, little research has examined how identity is linguistically produced in such sites. Adopting a sociocultural linguistic approach, this paper investigates identity construction in twelve expatriate blogs written in English through membership categorisation analysis (Sacks 1992) and the similarity dimension of tactics of intersubjectivity (Bucholtz & Hall 2004a,b). Key features are being a person in transition, adopting English practises and portraying relocation as a shared experience.