“Never seen Chinese people and Korean people try to learn each other’s language so hard”: scaling multilingualism and digital nationalism in transnational online conflict

Abstract Although transnational digital platforms are often associated with global connectivity, they also provide powerful arenas for the interactional production of nationalism. This article examines how digital nationalism is enacted through multilingual practices in transnational online conflict. It analyzes comments on two YouTube videos by Chinese influencer Li Ziqi, whose pickle-making content sparked a Sino-Korean dispute over the origin and ownership of a pickle labelled “spicy Chinese cabbage” or “kimchi”. Drawing on sociolinguistic scaling as a critical metapragmatic approach, this paper shows how participants mobilize the “scope” and “value” of linguistic resources through code choice, code-switching, code emplacement, and metalinguistic commentary to negotiate stance, visibility, legitimacy, and belonging before heterogeneous audiences. The analysis demonstrates that digital nationalism is not merely the online expression of pre-existing identities, but a situated performance through which national boundaries and broader global center-periphery hierarchies are constructed, contested, and reconfigured. It further shows that polarization in transnational conflict is non-linear: rather than producing a fixed “us versus them” dichotomy, participants repeatedly rescale these categories, expanding “us” toward broader witness, arbiter, and ally publics while narrowing “them” as a more isolated out-group. Multilingualism functions as both a communicative resource and a symbolic battleground in the co-production of nationalism, belonging, and hierarchy in everyday online interaction.