ABSTRACT
This chapter examines translinguistic practices employed in the metacommentary on language discussed in an online English learning community of Korean bloggers. Using virtual ethnographic methods, I collected and analyzed this community’s blog posts and comments going back to its inception in 2014. Given the widespread belief that Korea is a highly monolingual society where linguistic and cultural differences are often stigmatized or exoticized, many Korean bloggers in this community supported linguistic purism despite their profound investment in foreign language learning. In order to accentuate the commonplaceness of translinguistic practices, I focused on the posts and comments, in which the bloggers discussed the importance of preserving the purity of the Korean language and denouncing the language mixing of Korean and English. The findings reveal that the bloggers seamlessly and regularly engaged in translinguistic practices drawing upon semiotic resources (e.g., emoticons, cyber onomatopoeias, photos) while discussing linguistic purism. This juxtaposition between the metapragmatic discussions of their linguistic use and their actual linguistic practices not only normalizes translinguistic practices but also reveals the users’ motivation to engage in certain translinguistic practices but not in others.
