Resumen de Negotiating use, norm and authority in online language forums

Antonio Reyes, Juan Eduardo Bonnin

• The acquisition of a particular language and its standard norms of use have been traditionally channeled through education, dictionaries and institutional publications, but more and more, the internet has become a recurrent platform to consult norms and rules, through different forms of electronically mediated communication in which language users discuss, define and re-construct the idea of standard language. This study (1) presents a platform that has overtaken the spaces proposed institutionally to discuss normative uses of language; (2) explores the way social actors participate, refer to and construct the idea of standard language interactively in language forums and more importantly, (3) reveals the way authority about language use is constructed, displayed and accepted in these online communities of practice, even though members’ identities are limited to a few profile features, making them quasi-anonymous. This study contributes to a better understanding of language in society, in particular, of ideological debates about the Spanish language in competing non-institutional contexts, such as internet forums, where users re-define the standard language, debating language use dialogically.