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Danet, Brenda and Susan C. Herring (Eds.). The Multilingual Internet: Language, Culture, and Communication Online. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. xvi, 443. ISBN 978-0-19-530479-4 (cloth) $99.00; 978-0-19-530480-0 (paper) $35.00.
The Internet, online communication, SMS services, and computer-mediated communication (CMC) in general provide a wonderful real-world laboratory for linguistics and language study. Addressing nonEnglish speakers' online language use, this collection publishes 17 studies as part of an ongoing research study of online multilingualism. Early CMC protocols, considering only the English-speaking world, used a limited ASCII character set of the 26 Roman letters, their capital versions, the numbers from 0 to 9, and some punctuation. Only many years later did computer programmers take other languages and scripts into account with extended character sets. So Internet...