Emojis and Stickers as Multimodal Resources in Student Whatsapp Discourse: Functions, Meaning-Making and Identity

This study examines how emojis and stickers function as multimodal resources in the WhatsApp-mediated academic discourse of the National Association of Students of English and Literary Studies (NASELS), Federal University of Kashere, Nigeria. Drawing on Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2001) social semiotic approach, the study adopts a qualitative descriptive design to analyse 75 purposively selected chat threads containing 243 emojis and 126 stickers. The findings show that emojis and stickers perform affective, pragmatic, interpersonal, humorous, and identity-related functions, extending and sometimes substituting for verbal messages. While emojis primarily provide emotional and pragmatic cues, stickers often convey more elaborate expressive and interactional meanings and can function as standalone communicative acts. Both resources contribute to managing interpersonal relations, signalling shared humour, modifying the force of expressions, and reinforcing group identity. The study demonstrates that meaning in student WhatsApp interaction is constructed through the coordinated use of verbal and visual modes rather than through text alone. It contributes to research on digital discourse and multimodality by showing how Nigerian university students deploy emojis and stickers as integral semiotic resources for meaning-making and social interaction in digitally mediated academic communication.