When Englishes go digital

Digital communications have meant a significant acceleration in rate and a widening in scope of interactions across Englishes (Friedrich & de Figueiredo, 2016). From social media posts to fan-fiction writing, Englishes have been re-negotiated, and new norms of interface and collaboration have been forged. Hybrid varieties have emerged, and new norms of politeness and opposition (Barnes, 2015) are constantly developing. For example, fan fiction can work as a channel for rewriting social norms through modification of existing texts (Leavenworth, 2015, p. 40), and each social media outlet has its own norms of accepted practices that give away who is an insider and who is not. Through an unstructured exploratory analysis, this paper discusses a few of the features and loci of these new modes of interaction (as in the delineation of speech community, conversational patterns, linguistic innovation) by visiting some of the media most affected by digital modes (such as social media, fan fiction communities, and texting). I will conclude with directions for further research and suggestions for pedagogical actions that not only prepare learners to deal with this reality but also take advantage of the skills they already intuitively bring into classrooms, virtual and physical.