Lexical choices in French Instagram captions of Indonesian traditional cuisine: A study of Djakarta Bali Restaurant

Abstract

This research investigated how lexical choices are constructed in French captions promoting Indonesian traditional cuisine on Instagram. The purpose of this study is to explore how the French language functions as a medium for cultural branding and the internationalization of traditional Indonesian cuisine. This research employed a qualitative descriptive method. The data consisted of 24 captions explicitly describing traditional Indonesian cuisine, taken from the Djakarta Bali Instagram account up to December 2025. These captions were selected because they provide a representative and manageable corpus of Instagram promotional discourse for examining recurring lexical choices. Data were collected using documentation and note-taking techniques. The results show that lexical choices in French captions promoting Indonesian cuisine are constructed through language that emphasize luxury, rarity, sensory intensity, and cultural rootedness. The analysis identified four types of lexical choices used in Djakarta Bali Restaurant’s French Instagram captions:  sensory intensity, with 19 lexemes (44.18%), cultural rootedness, with 14 lexemes (32.55%), and luxury and rarity, which were the least dominant, each with five lexemes (11.62%). Thus, sensory intensity was the most dominant type of lexical choice that existed in the captions. This indicates that the captions strategically emphasize taste, aroma, and overall experience to engage readers emotionally and vividly. It also suggests that the restaurant foregrounds authenticity and experiential enjoyment rather than luxury or exclusivity in presenting Indonesian traditional cuisine. Academically, this study contributes to lexical semantics, discourse analysis, and digital linguistics. Practically, the findings offer insights for restaurants and marketers on crafting more effective, sensory-rich captions to enhance audience engagement. This study also provides a foundation for comparative interdisciplinary and corpus-based studies on lexical strategies across languages, cultures, and digital promotional platforms.