Platformed Cultural Reframing: Decoding Chinese Nicknames of Global Tennis Athletes in Social Media Discourse

Although existing research has examined the linguistic and cultural meanings of sporting nicknames, less attention has been paid to how they participate in constructing and negotiating global athletes’ identities within local context and digital environments. Drawing on qualitative critical discourse analysis of 96 Chinese nickname entries, this study investigates their construction, circulation, and sociocultural implications. The findings identify five recurring naming mechanisms, including phonetic domestication, appearance-based naming, incident-based naming, playing-style-based naming, and achievement-based naming. Through these mechanisms, nicknames selectively foreground athlete attributes and generate culturally situated representations. These nicknames also circulate through fan interactions, hashtag-based discussions, and multimodal content on Chinese digital platforms, with part of the expressions gaining recognition from athletes and sporting institutions. At the social level, naming practices may reproduce gendered hierarchies and convey shifting evaluations, revealing the coexistence of participatory creativity and discursive power. Integrating these findings, the study proposes “platformed cultural reframing” as a conceptual perspective linking symbolic reconstruction, platform-mediated circulation, and sociocultural evaluation, contributing to scholarship on sports communication, digital fan culture, and the cultural politics of sport globalization.