TENOR AS A MULTIMODAL REGISTER CHARACTERISTIC OF THE INSTAGRAM PROFILE (a compared analysis of Queen Rania’s official website and Instagram profile in Arabic and English)
Authors:   Lviv State University of Life Safety, Babelyuk Oksana A. , Zaza Yuliya Ya. ,   Ivan Franko National University of Lviv
Published: December 2024

Instagram is currently the object of linguistic research in various fields. For linguistic socio-semiotic
research, Instagram is valuable, particularly for its multimodality. The methodological basis of the article is the
theory of register, which is a tool of social semiotics. The article specifically examines Instagram as a subject
of linguistic socio-semantic research and proposes a general methodology for analyzing the interpersonal
function, using Queen Rania’s official Instagram profile as a case study. It explores this profile as a multimodal
virtual situational context of communication, comparing it to official websites.
As a virtual social context, Instagram provides its users with access to the implementation of three
meta-functions: interpersonal, ideational and textual.
The purpose of the article is to identify the relevant multimodal parameters of tenor of Instagram
profiles and to compare them with websites in Arabic and English. Additionally, the article aims to describe
the case characteristics of tenor of the official profile of Queen Rania of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan
within the context of social semiotics. To describe tenor of the Instagram profile in comparison with the
official websites in Arabic and English of Queen Rania, the following social parameters were stratified: social
status, social role, and situational social role. The study has accomplished the following tasks: a review of
current socio-semiotic research, which examines the functions of the language system in the context of
their emergence; a consideration of M. Halliday’s provisions, which describe variations in language use as a
combination of semantic resources influenced by contextual variations; and the practical multidisciplinary application of the theory of register. Additionally, the concept of “multimodal discourse” of Instagram as
an object of linguistic socio-semiotic research is examined, and a general methodology for describing the
interpersonal function of an Instagram profile as a multimodal virtual situational context of communication
is proposed.
The article employs various general scientific and linguistic research methods: a deductive method to
identify tenor register characteristics as an expression of the interpersonal metafunction of an Instagram
profile; a descriptive method, which includes external interpretation (to assess the influence of Instagram’s
situational context on the interpersonal function) and internal interpretation. The method of semiotic
decoding of visual information was applied for interpretation, and the
comparative method was used to analyze the multimodal characteristics of websites in relation to Queen
Rania’s Instagram profile.
A qualitative method was used to describe the multimodal characteristics of websites in Arabic
and English and Queen Rania’s Instagram profile. Additionally, a comparative method was employed to
compare the multimodal characteristics of tenor of websites and Instagram profiles. Using the example of
Queen Rania’s official profile, the possibility of highlighting the following multimodal parameters of tenor
in the situational context of Instagram was demonstrated: visual semiotic (photo); multicultural language
of social statuses; popularity; silence (absence of responses to comments); ability to assess a person of
royal social status.
Instagram is presented as a virtual semiotic space of emotionally significant signs, represented through
verbal (text, hashtags), visual (photos), and video channels (short videos, reels). Socio-semantic analysis
reveals that tenor, as the interpersonal function of an Instagram profile, is shaped by multimodal semiotic
components, each contributing to varying degrees of interpersonal interaction within the communicative
space. It has been proven that the components of the interpersonal function, as a register characteristic of
tenor of an Instagram profile, include social stratification data and social activity as a variable component.
As a register characteristic, tenor is dynamic and influenced by temporal, cultural, and situational contexts
— the extralinguistic context in which Instagram’s multimodal meanings are created. The applied socio-
semantic analysis of multimodal signs on Queen Rania’s profile revealed a correlation between the
interpersonal and ideational functions. The most popular (tenor) hyper-themes (field), include ‘personal
life, family, holidays, and children’ which are expressed through bright, emotional photos as multimodal
resources. The color of the visual content serves both expressive and social functions, influencing the level
of social interaction.
The interpersonal, ideational, and textual functions of Instagram as a virtual situational context, with
its registers as a configuration of semantic resources, are embodied by multimodal means, demonstrating
the multimodality of Instagram registers as a combination of signs from different semiotic systems.