ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we apply virtual ethnographic methods to the study of multilingualism in online contexts. The chapter begins with a brief outline of the evolution and current situation of multilingualism in online contexts. This is followed by an overview of virtual ethnography as a research method, before demonstrating its application to researching multilingualism. We also include a review of ethical issues in researching multilingualism online. Following this, we describe two of our own studies, which illustrate how virtual ethnography can be used to study top-down multilingualism in monologic web spaces, and also bottom-up multilingualisms in dialogic Web 2.0 contexts.
