Review of Moll, Andrea (2015) Jamaican Creole Goes Web: Sociolinguistic styling and authenticity in a digital ‘Yaad’

Since its inception, research on creole languages has focused on data from rural, little mobile, little educated and older populations because they are thought to be least affected by external influences. But how representative are these data? Moll’s study of cyber-Jamaican suggests that such conservative practices are ideologically salient, but are merely one of the linguistic resources that people draw on. The study highlights aspects that deserve more attention in research on creoles, including language practices in transnational, socially heterogeneous communities, the exploration of the distribution and semiotics of patterns of linguistic variability, mixed methods approaches, and the investigation of written practices to understand processes of language variation and change.