WP124 Metapragmatic activities on Facebook: Enregisterment across written and spoken language practices

In this paper I argue that written practices take up an important role in people?s everyday discursive practices because of the widespread availability and impact of social media and digital communication. However, this is not reflected in studies of language change, as it has not been customary to incorporate written practices. Yet concepts such as Agha?s (2007) enregisterment argue in favor of incorporating written practices, since enregisterment encourages us to consider all metapragmatic processes that contribute to making a particular ?way of discourse? differentiable (Agha 2007:80). So both spoken and written discourse should be considered in language change, and in this article I illustrate how young people from a linguistically and culturally diverse area of Copenhagen use linguistic features indexical of speech styles on Facebook. I describe how the use of these resources points towards different stereotypes and what sense of rights and sanctions are involved in the reactions to the use these different types of marked language use.