Sociolinguistic Approaches for Intercultural New Media Studies

Abstract

“Intercultural new media studies” is said to be the next frontier in intercultural communication (Shuter, 2012). The present paper will first review the realm of intercultural new media studies that attend to the structures and patterns of new media usage and critique how well the methods and findings in the existing literature have attempted to achieve the aims of understanding new media communication across cultures. Afterwards, the paper will present two significant approaches in sociolinguistics, i.e., Variationist Sociolinguistics and Interactional Sociolinguistics, detailing the assumptions and methods of these two approaches, and discuss how they can be well utilized and integrated with the advances in the communication discipline so as to contribute to our further understanding of new media communication that takes place across cultures.

Keywords

Variationist sociolinguistics / interactional sociolinguistics / new media / intercultural communication

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