Volume 39, Issue 2 - Special issue: Multilingual, multilectal, and multiscriptal writing Issue editors: Cecelia Cutler, Unn Røyneland and Zvjezdana Vrzić

This article focuses on the complex nature of the creative freedom often displayed in acts of digital social writing. Drawing on theoretical contributions from philosophy of language and psychology, the authors argue that even in communication where prescriptive norms are deliberately challenged, creative ways of multilectal and multilingual writing are still shaped by norms and normativity. Mutually recognized norms are part of the common ground that communicators must maintain to secure audience uptake.This is illustrated with three examples, where explicit and implicit negotiations of norms take place in online contexts. In both antagonistic and friendly contexts, we see that successful norm-violating communication involves a collaborative interplay of layers of normativity . Instances of norm shifts and norm challenges of the sort displayed here should not be seen as special cases or fringe phenomena, nor as acts of inherent socio-political significance, but as frequent and highly adaptable moves typical of human language use. Improvised norm shifts manifest a form of creativity that is basic to linguistic communicative competence.

Written culture in medieval Scandinavia featured the concurrent use of different languages–Latin and the local vernaculars–and two scripts–the Roman script and the runic script. Although Latin carried substantial cultural capital as the cosmopolitan language of religious and juridical authorities, diplomacy, and high literate culture, the vernacular runic written tradition had already been established for many centuries and continued to be used alongside Latin and the Roman script. This coexistence was particularly evident in the epigraphic landscape and resulted in several inscriptions that mixed both languages and scripts. This article explores the choices of language and script made by two medieval inscribers who, despite being primarily trained within a vernacular runic tradition, used Latin and/or the Roman script, particularly in their signatures. The study argues that these inscribers leveraged the symbolic value of Latin and the Roman script to project a distinctive professional identity in response to a changing linguistic market in which these linguistic resources were gaining value. The analysis also illustrates how these inscribers’ highly individual practices resulted from a negotiation of different linguistic norms and highlights a tension between their level of literacy and their efforts to display cultural capital. Finally, the article argues that the use of Latin and the Roman script was motivated more by their symbolic value than by purely communicative necessity, offering parallels to modern instances of language commodification.

The Illyrian Movement, a 19th-century Croatian nationalist initiative, aimed to establish the Štokavian dialect as the foundation of the Croatian literary language, promoting cultural unity while resisting German and Hungarian influences. This study explores multilingual writing practices in Ilirske narodne novine [Illyrian National Newspaper], focusing on the use of German and Latin to clarify newly introduced Croatian terms. These elements, termed translational explanatory equivalents (TEEs), reveal the Movement’s pragmatic engagement with foreign languages despite its ideological commitment to linguistic purity. While members viewed foreign language use as unpatriotic, TEEs demonstrate a nuanced strategy: foreign languages were employed to bridge comprehension gaps and promote the national language. The study highlights the paradox of animosity toward foreign languages alongside their practical use, illustrating the complex interplay between cultural nationalism, functional multilingualism, and language planning in 19th-century Croatia. By analyzing these practices, the article contributes to broader discussions on the politics of scripts and writing in multilingual and multilectal contexts, as well as power struggles surrounding language standardization processes. Ultimately, it illuminates an underexplored dimension of multilingual writing, revealing a contradiction between the Illyrian Movement’s purist ideology and its actual language practices.

This paper documents and analyzes the different orthographic systems created throughout time to put into writing Istro-Romanian, Vlashki or Zheyanski, a small severely endangered Romance language spoken in Croatia. While the language has not been used in education or virtually at all in written contexts in everyday life in the community, orthographic representations of the language have existed since the second half of the 19th century and were devised mostly by the scholars of the language. These orthographic representations are discussed and compared with those created spontaneously by community members in the late 20th century. The analysis first considers the linguistic bases for the different writing systems and weighs their advantages and disadvantages. Then, it evaluates the indexical potential of different orthographic choices and practices and social meanings created by them. The paper also discusses the ideological, symbolic and even political motivations that may have been at play when different orthographic choices were made and points to the complex decisions that creating a standardized orthography for this endangered language would require.

Contemporary Iran is estimated to be home to 75 languages. Yet, since the rise of Persian nationalism over the past century, the state’s language management and policies have granted the official status to the Persian language and script alone and led to regulations prohibiting any public use of non-Persian script in formal signage. Against this backdrop, this paper investigates ideological and political indexical meanings of the de jure and de facto policies as well as grassroots practices by ethnic minority groups with respect to writing and choice of script(s) in Iran. We draw on different government policy documents, and samples of writing on social media by different social actors in different parts of the country. We showcase how the state’s monolingual language policies are contested by the indexical meanings ethnic minority speakers evoke through their specific script choices in their writing on social media spaces. We argue that multi-scriptal writing, by indexing translocal and transnational identities, challenges monolingual policies, with strong implications for national unity.

This paper draws attention to a form of writing and reading that is sorely neglected and sidelined both in writing research and society, despite its widespread use and importance, viz. braille. I will argue that braille does not fit well with some core assumptions (ideologies) of writing, such as the assumption that writing is ‘visual communication’, and that this might be the reason why it has been so often dismissed as a ‘special case’, an ‘auxiliary’ or a ‘secondary notation system’, rather than having been accepted and celebrated as what it is: a highly fascinating (and multiply variable) script in its own right. The paper approaches braille from a script-theoretical and a sociolinguistic perspective. It summarises its main principles and features and critically discusses both the widespread disregard of the script and the problematic classification in the few works that touch upon it. Furthermore, potential (hitherto mostly unexplored) sociolinguistic approaches to braille (usage) – its social meaning, indexicality, and ideologies related to it – are discussed. The main aim of the paper is to elaborate why this form of writing, if taken seriously, not only fundamentally challenges some widespread notions of graphic communication, but also the societal, and sociolinguistic, apotheosis of the visual.

This article examines scriptal hybridity in Greek digital discourse through the framework of trans-scripting, a script-focused extension of translanguaging. Moving beyond digraphia and biscriptality, which conceptualize scriptal choice as functionally distributed and socially compartmentalized, trans-scripting highlights how fluid and context-specific recombinations of scripts serve as semiotic resources in mediated discourse and interaction. The analysis focuses on two non-canonical script practices in Greek: Greeklish (Romanized Greek) and Engreek (Greek-scripted English) and is organized in two case studies. The first analyses feature-level script alternations in advertising discourse, utterance-level trans-scripting in online discussions, and instances of trans-scripting in language-ideological discourse. The second case study is based on a diachronic Reddit corpus (151,268 comments, 2015–2021) and documents patterns and functions of Engreek in user-generated discourse. Synthesizing these findings, the paper proposes a typology of four trans-scripting patterns: grapheme-level alternations, rescripting of lexical items and chunks, contextualized double voicing, and language-ideological critique. Trans-scripting simultaneously destabilizes inherited mappings of language and script while reproducing language-ideological fixities, contingent on genre, medium, and interactional context. Overall, the study underscores the importance of scriptal hybridity in contemporary digital literacies and its significance for understanding identity, ideology, and semiotic creativity in networked communication.

Interest in the use of digital resources by migrants is growing in sociolinguistics research, given the central role that digital technologies and social media platforms have in their migration process, in the establishment of communities of belonging, and in the creation and negotiation of identities. However, most sociolinguistic research has focused on digital diasporas and their use of different technologies and spaces. In our paper, we investigate a little-explored context: the communicative strategies used on Facebook by multilingual migrant youth who do not belong to a diasporic community, but rather form their own attachments to others based on their migration trajectories. Taking up Lexander and Androutsopoulos’ (2023) concept of ‘digital polycentricity’, our focus is on how these young people navigate their orientation to different centers loosely defined as ‘home’ and ‘local’ communities and on how their developing use of linguistic and semiotic resources responds to the changes in their experiences and language repertoires. We show that online communication with members of the local community is centered on specific topics, styles and the use of what we have called a ‘digital translingua’, a unique form of multilingual and multilectal writing formed through a mixture of different linguistic and semiotic resources which constitutes one aspect of their multimodal digital translingual repertoires. Our paper contributes to the study of polycentric digital communication but also to the investigation of multilingual non-diasporic communities within specific virtual spaces.

This paper examines multilectal writing in New York City as part of the larger phenomenon of multilingual, multilectal and multiscriptal writing. It focuses on the written representation of two enregistered phonological features (i.e. non-rhoticity and the raised back vowel [ɔ]) as well as colloquial expressions that index the imagined speech style of many New Yorkers. It explores how these forms are disseminated across a range of public ‘language objects’ and how they are interpreted by people who encounter them. Linguistically and culturally, New York City and its inhabitants exist in an imaginary that is heavily shaped and mediated by televised shows, movies, novels, and other forms of artistic production. Recent work on public displays of language in New York City illustrates the different stances, alignments, cultures and languages indexed in signage (old school vs. new school; Jewish and Italian immigrants vs. more recent arrivals like Latinos, Asians, etc. and their respective languages). This paper explores the material extension and commodification of these cultural and linguistic signifiers across a corpus of publicly consumable objects/artifacts including a road sign, a t-shirt, and stoneware souvenirs: a coffee mug, a sugar bowl, and a set of salt and pepper shakers. These artifacts index ever-shifting sets of meanings and ideologies they animate about New Yorkers and New York City English.