Norms, Polycentricity, and Polylanguaging on Social Media

This contribution examines adolescent language use, interaction, and acts of identification on social media sites. Our approach is sociolinguistic, and we show how the understanding of language users today needs to break free from previously well-established sociolinguistic notions such as languages as countable units. In the following we argue that hybridity in language use is not intrinsically deviant, that language users may have multiple belongings and identifications, and that linguistic ideology must be accounted for by researchers. We also demonstrate how notions such as registers, polycentricity, and (poly)languaging enable us to address the relationships between language users, language form, social goals, and normativity. The data come from three linguistically heterogeneous European settings, and all focus on hybridity and ethnicity.