ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses how young peoples’ digital language practices on social media can inform our discussion of standardization processes. Following a growing body of mediatization research, we view mediated language use as a central factor in sociolinguistic change in contemporary societies. Analyzing and comparing young peoples’ dialect use on Facebook across the three field sites, we argue that language variation online is imbued with social meaning and serves interactional functions in similar ways as variation in speech. By studying the young peoples’ dialect use across online and offline contexts, we discuss different ways in which online dialect contributes to our understanding of the role of social media in processes of sociolinguistic change. We do so by addressing how dialect is used in similar ways across online and offline everyday contexts and by discussing the ways in which metalinguistic reflections on dialect spelling contribute to knowledge about norms of dialect use. Finally, we consider how audiovisual mediation of dialect in mass and social media affects users’ perceptions and evaluations of their local ways of speaking and how this is expressed in metapragmatic accounts across generations.
