Multilingualism and the Internet

This entry outlines how multilingualism on the internet can mean a variety of things, depending on how the notion of the internet is conceptualized, which genres and modes of communication or language settings are focused on, and the disciplinary perspective from which their analysis is approached. It also aims at illustrating the paradigms of current research on multilingualism on the internet. One of these is the macro‐sociolinguistic approach that is concerned with assessing the degree of linguistic diversity online, evaluating the threat posed by English as a popular vehicular language to other (smaller, minority) languages in the world, and using the internet as an instrument and forum in language maintenance and revitalization. Another central research paradigm is the study of the multilingual discourse practices of internet users in different modes of communication, drawing on concepts and microanalytic methods provided by, for example, discourse studies, pragmatics, interactional sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and ethnography. The entry also describes some of the crucial features of multilingual internet discourse and suggests that often it can usefully be anatomized with the help of the notion of heteroglossia. Finally, the entry discusses the implications of multilingualism on the internet to language learning.