ABSTRACT
This chapter lays out the main tenets of heteroglossia, as understood in applied linguistics research, and show how it has been applied to digital communication. In fact, heteroglossia can be seen as working on two levels: not only at a formal or textual level, but also at the social level. Heteroglossic tensions emerge from the contrast between original and localised versions, and from the dialogue between the spectacle itself and the user comments, but this happens in different ways in the two videos. The concept of heteroglossia allows digital researchers to investigate hybridity in all its forms and in particular to consider the political and ideological functions, motivations and tensions that lie behind online diversity. Despite attempts to operationalise the term for the analysis of specific texts, heteroglossia is likely to remain a somewhat fluid analytical concept, lacking the precision of the categories and concepts it displaces: code-switching, multimodality, language variation.
