ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with what and how multilingualism is “thematized” (Kelly-Holmes and Milani, 2013) by people who may or may not be multilinguals themselves. Up to this point, this book has focused largely on multilingual texts online as linguistic output (Crystal, 2011); that is, multilingualism is realized through language choice and code-switching in the texts produced by web users. This chapter turns to the representations of multilingualism on the internet. Speaking of media in a general sense, Holmes and Milani (2013: 1) offer a useful distinction between language of the media and language in the media. The former
is concerned with observing and analyzing linguistic phenomena in CMC texts, on which the previous chapters have concentrated; the latter, which is the focus of this chapter, is related to: “(1) issues of how language is used to organise, categorise or target media; (2) how (different) languages are used as content within the media; and (3) what kinds of metalinguistic discourse underpinned by which language ideologies take place in the media”. Likewise, representations of multilingualism take many forms on the internet. First, multiple languages have been used to organize media content, such as Wikipedia entries. Wikipedia’s language policy and users’ discussion of it on the Wikitalk page have been of interest to researchers in recent years (Ensslin, 2013; Deumert, 2014). Second, in terms of languages as content, we have come across numerous English-based websites that deliberately draw on multiple languages to perform a global persona; an example is the way Flickr greets its users in multiple languages (discussed later). Third, web users, regardless of their linguistic backgrounds and knowledge, often talk about languages when participating in social media. For example, Flickr users who do not speak English as a primary language often undermine their English abilities in public comments (Lee, 2012). These three ways of representing multilingualism online are further elaborated in the rest of the chapter. Drawing on examples from various social media, this chapter also discusses how talking about languages and multilingualism online creates new language learning opportunities.
