Multilingual social grooming on social media and self-perceived multilingual identity among Chinese university students

Background Chinese university students purposefully use English-only and mixed Chinese-English posts, comments, and replies to share experiences, acknowledge others, and maintain ties, and everyday commentary often reads the practice as showing off. Identity scholarship holds that a multilingual identity is claimed through visible social participation, and quantitative research on digital multilingualism has centred on consumption and learning. This study conceptualises the practice as multilingual social grooming and, drawing on self-conscious emotion and social capital theory, asks whether it relates to self-perceived multilingual identity through authentic pride and online bridging social capital, with need for uniqueness moderating the affective process. Methods A questionnaire survey of 755 Chinese university students was analysed with a conditional process model and bootstrap confidence intervals. Results Multilingual social grooming was positively associated with self-perceived multilingual identity, directly and through both intervening processes; the relational indirect association was larger. The grooming-pride association and its indirect association were stronger at higher need for uniqueness ( f 2 = 0.010); an exploratory negative interaction appeared for bridging capital ( f 2 = 0.007). Conclusion Relational communication in an additional language is a site of multilingual identity work, tied to a multilingual sense of self through the self-appraisal of competent communication and the wider ties it sustains, strongest for students who value distinctiveness. The findings extend multilingual identity research towards everyday media production.