ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses more specifically on the sociolinguistics of the new media, which has grown into a vibrant subfield of sociolinguistics. It begins with the development of the new technologies of communication and information in the second half of the twentieth century, and in the twenty-first century it has experienced exponential growth in the number of publications and researchers working in the field. Like linguistic landscape studies, new media sociolinguistics has come of age by developing from the more linguistic approaches of the late twentieth century to the increasingly user-based or ethnographically based approaches of the twenty-first century. The chapter explains what Androutsopoulos means by 'heteroglossic contrasts' and argues that a full understanding of such positioning and tensions can only be achieved by taking an ethnographic approach. It discusses language contact phenomena in digital language, the limited multilingualism of the Internet and the policing of new media language.
