This chapter explores how multilingual users perceive their audience on semi-public social network sites (SNSs), and how these perceptions shape users’ language choices as they construct and maintain translocal communities. It does so by building upon a widely used framework for understanding style choices in spoken interaction: Bell’s ‘audience design’ (1984). Bell’s model posits that a speaker’s stylistic choices can in great part be shaped by their attempts to accommodate to their addressees and to others present in the exchange, and this basic principle also holds for online contexts. However, the particular affordances of communication via SNSs are likely to result in interesting differences between the type of audiences perceived by someone posting on an SNS such as Facebook, and the audiences which Bell’s model describes for spoken interaction. Firstly, unlike either conversational or broadcast talk, the type of interactions that typically take place on SNSs are conducted via the written mode, and yet at the same time they exhibit much of the interactivity and informality that is often found in speech. Secondly, given that they sit somewhere between personal conversation and public broadcasts, SNSs can be described as ‘semi-public’ forums in the sense that a user’s audience, while often large, diverse and unseen, generally comprises people they know. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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