This article draws on Judith T. Irvine’s theorizing of the semiotic processes of differentiation to investigate how Sri Lankan Tamils and Muslims configure similarity and difference in multimodal social media interactions. I analyze Facebook discussions around memes of Tamil-language blunders in trilingual public signs, which are widely taken to represent the incomplete implementation of Tamil as a co-official language. Insider status in groups is not contingent on code use, but on expressing particular alignments toward the memes as tokens of a type. By virtue of their metapragmatic ambiguity, emojis are powerful in enabling participants to create shared affective stances around the memes, but they are also useful in demarcating difference between Tamil speakers and Sinhalas. I contribute to studies of social media communication by examining how different linguistic and non-linguistic forms of expression are used to delineate transnational Tamil digital publics.

中文翻译：

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模因、表情符号和文本：斯里兰卡泰米尔语数字公众的差异化符号学

本文借鉴 Judith T. Irvine 对符号学分化过程的理论化，研究斯里兰卡泰米尔人和穆斯林如何在多模式社交媒体互动中配置相似性和差异性。我分析了 Facebook 围绕三语公共标志中泰米尔语错误模因的讨论，这些模因被广泛认为代表泰米尔语作为一种共同官方语言的不完整实施。组中的内部人员身份不取决于代码的使用，而是取决于将模因的特定对齐方式表达为一种类型的标记。凭借其元语用模糊性，表情符号在使参与者能够围绕模因创建共同的情感立场方面非常强大，但它们也有助于区分泰米尔语使用者和僧伽罗语之间的差异。