ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes strategies of (de)legitimization that language users employ in different settings of digital communication to support their ideological positions when they participate in language debates online. These social actors build and negotiate knowledge and authority collectively through participating and interacting in online communities around a topic of interest. These communities engage in debates on language reforms that (re)produce ideologies, compete for hegemony, and construct social identities. These individuals, defined by Rymes and Leone (2014) as “Citizen sociolinguists”, control fundamental aspects of the debate about language use and standardization. Through digital communication, social actors share information around a topic of interest, and more importantly, they associate certain practices with values and prestige, legitimizing some practices and consequently delegitimizing others in a platform that has overtaken the spaces proposed institutionally to discuss normative uses of language. On this platform, some language users employ legitimization strategies though rationality, voices of expertise and personal experience, and establish themselves as true “language brokers” who set specific values to different language uses in a linguistic market.
