Multilingual Youth Practices in Computer Mediated Communication

With an eye to the playful, reflexive, self-conscious ways in which global youth engage with each other online, this volume analyzes user-generated data from these interactions to show how communication technologies and multilingual resources are deployed to project local as well as trans-local orientations. With examples from a range of multilingual settings, each author explores how youth exploit the creative, heteroglossic potential of their linguistic repertoires, from rudimentary attempts to engage with others in a second language to hybrid multilingual practices. Often, their linguistic, orthographic, and stylistic choices challenge linguistic purity and prescriptive correctness, yet, in other cases, their utterances constitute language policing, linking 'standardness' or 'correctness' to piety, trans-local affiliation, or national belonging. Written for advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers in linguistics, applied linguistics, education and media and communication studies, this volume is a timely and readymade resource for researching online multilingualism with a range of methodologies and perspectives.

Cecelia Cutler's sociolinguistic research explores language and identity among adolescents, language attitudes towards Spanish and dialects of English, digital language practices, and changes in New York City English. She is author of White Hip Hopppers, Language and Identity in Post-Modern America (2014) and co-editor of Language Contact in Africa and the African Diaspora in the Americas (2017).

Unn Røyneland's sociolinguistic research investigates linguistic practices among adolescents in multilingual Oslo, enregisterment of new speech styles, language attitudes, dialect acquisition among immigrants, language policy and planning, and digital language practices. She is co-editor of Language Standardisation: Theory and Practice (2016), and wrote the article 'Reality rhymes - recognition of rap in multicultural Norway' for Linguistics and Education.