ABSTRACT
Since the 1990s, the rapid development and spread of computer-mediated communication (CMC) has altered the linguistic and discursive ‘landscape’ in which a considerable proportion of people—especially in the affluent parts of the world—operate their daily lives. Thus, CMC encompasses important and influential means of mediation of present and future multilingual practices. Paolillo observed as early as 1996 that ‘we witness the evolution of a language contact situation of an unprecedented scale’ as the Internet ‘links millions of people with hundreds of different native languages’, bringing with them ‘highly varying language backgrounds’. 1 Since then, work on the (mostly written-form) multilingualism of the Internet has expanded (Danet and Herring, 2003, 2007; Leppänen and Peuronen, in press; Androutsopoulos, forthcoming), covering a broad range of sociolinguistic contexts and online communication formats, both asynchronous (online press, mailing lists) and synchronous (instant messaging, chat rooms). Researchable issues have ranged from macro-level online diversity (Paolillo, 2007) and adaptations of writing systems to language choice in CMC, gender dynamics and code-switching (Androutsopoulos, 2007, forthcoming). Yet these directions have hardly been integrated into the mainstream of code-switching research: for instance, in her otherwise well-informed, comprehensive monograph, Gardner-Chloros (2009) hardly mentions CMC at all (but see p. 21).
