From Oral tales to Online threads: Digital Folklore and the Reimagining of Meeteilon identity

Abstract

The paper is about the fate of a language when fireside folktales are re-established as Facebook posts and Instagram stories. Shifting attention towards Meeteilon, one which was perpetuated by oral traditions, the paper discusses the way in which digital space is reasserting its definition of the language in the era of migration, education, and globalised cultural exchange. The study examines the use of humour, memes, abbreviations, and internet slang as new linguistic creativity by younger speakers, especially those between the age of 22 and 27, by relying on the responses of eighty-nine respondents in the context of rural, semi-urban, urban, and outsideManipur. The results reveal that nowadays, social media sites serve as the new fireplaces in which collaborative laughter, inside jokes, and cultural memories continue to make Meeteilon alive. The rural users will be more likely to keep the older vocabulary, whereas the urban speakers are more likely to engage in more code-mixing due to peer networks and international media. Structural problems that the participants observed were also perceived as lexical gaps and a lack of digital typing equipment. Interestingly, a lot of new slangs have a history to older words, as well as 1990s-2000s Manipuri films, which suggests the idea that reinvention most of the time functions as remembrance. In general, the research claims that digital folklore does not presuppose the linguistic recession, but rather a negotiation of transformation between the traditional and modern worlds, which allows Meeteilon to rebrand its identity in the postcolonial, globalised era.