Free Your Stuff Luxembourg! Language policies, practices and ideologies in a multilingual Facebook group

This article considers the dynamic relationship between language policies,
practices and ideologies in a multilingual Facebook group in Luxembourg. The
group under focus, ‘Free Your Stuff Luxembourg’, was created to facilitate the costfree
exchange of consumer goods between members located in Luxembourg. The
article traces the development of a language policy for a group that facilitates
communication between people of diverse nationalities in an officially trilingual
country, where French, German and Luxembourgish operate as administrative
languages and English plays an increasingly important role. Part one analyses the
development of the group’s official language policy by group administrators,
showing progression from an implicitly English language policy to an explicitly
multilingual policy, incorporating a strong place for Luxembourgish. Part two
considers how the language practices of group members relate to this official language
policy, using a quantitative analysis of the language(s) of group posts across
three periods from February 2011 to April 2012. This analysis shows a shift from
predominantly English language practices to a balance between English and Luxembourgish,
and finally a dominance of Luxembourgish. Part three investigates a
further influence on language policy development, the language ideologies of group
administrators and members, as expressed in language ideological debates within
the group. The results provide several insights in relation to language policies in the
new media, addressing the role of new agents of language policy (group administrators)
in regulating language use in this context, the processes by which individuals
police each other’s language use online, and the extent to which language
practices in online environments can be managed, if at all, through language policy
activity.