In this chapter I consider metalinguistic reflections on language use as well as interactional practices on Facebook involving features and values corresponding to the enregistered speech styles of ‘street language’ and ‘integrated language’. By studying these speech styles I investigate how adolescents orient towards different norms of language use on Facebook. The point of departure for my discussion is the public debate on digital communication technologies and spelling skills. In the debate, social media is often claimed to be responsible for the younger generations’ alleged poor spelling skills and linguistic decay. In the analysis I find that the young people orient towards different norms of language use in their interactions on Facebook – that is, both peer group norms and standard orthography. Thereby, this chapter portrays young peoples’ linguistic practices in social media environments as polycentric. Yet, although these environments are certainly polycentric there are also normative restrictions to communications in these social spaces. Some of them are peer governed, but standard orthography still plays a part.

Introduction

This chapter addresses the theme of language and normativity in social media communication. By examining young people’s interactional practices on Facebook, I study how they orient towards different norms of language use in such social spaces. Thus, I aim to nuance prevalent assumptions about (1) social media as an unregulated communicative space and (2) linguistic standard norms as irrelevant to social media communication. Characteristic of the adolescent’s Facebook interactions are that they reflect an orientation towards different orders of normativity – that is, both standard orthography and peer generated norms. In the study of normativity I examine how the adolescents use two well described speech styles or registers in their written practices on Facebook and I further consider how these written representations of speech styles relate to standard orthography. Furthermore, I look into how these registers are represented in writing and how this contributes to our knowledge about the value ascriptions of these styles.