Digital Politeness as Communicative Scaffolding: Emojis and the Batak Angkola Dialect in WhatsApp-Based Academic Communication

Abstract

Academic communication through WhatsApp requires students to negotiate institutional hierarchy, interpersonal relationships, and linguistic choices within a digital environment where nonverbal cues are limited. This study aims to examine how emojis and the Batak Angkola dialect function as relational and pragmatic resources in students' academic communication and how their use varies according to participant relationships and academic purposes. The study employed a qualitative case study design with a digital pragmatics approach involving 80 students from the Indonesian Language Education Study Program at Universitas Muhammadiyah Tapanuli Selatan. The primary data consisted of 58 conversation threads comprising 185 messages obtained from eight course-based WhatsApp groups between September and December 2025. The data were complemented by semi-structured interviews with 16 students and 6 lecturers and were analyzed through pragmatic coding, relational analysis, and thematic development. The findings indicate that digital politeness is relational and adaptive rather than determined by isolated linguistic forms. Student-lecturer interactions more consistently employed greetings, academic forms of address, mitigation, explicit communicative purposes, and appreciative closings, whereas student-student communication tended to use a more familiar and direct register. Emojis functioned contextually as resources for mitigation, appreciation, affection, solidarity, humor, and emotional response, while the Batak Angkola dialect contributed to interpersonal closeness, solidarity, clarification, emphasis, and group identity. These resources did not automatically reduce academic formality but were adjusted according to the interlocutor, communicative purpose, and interactional context. The findings demonstrate that digital politeness can function as communicative scaffolding by helping participants manage social distance, preserve interpersonal relationships, and facilitate academic coordination in WhatsApp-based learning environments.