Pragmatics meets ideology: Digraphia and non-standard orthographic practices in Serbian online news forums

Serbian is a unique example of active digraphia, that is, the use of two scripts by the same speech community. Writers of Serbian use both the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets in various domains. Moreover, the Internet has brought to the fore competing orthographic variants within the Serbian Latin writing system. Technology-driven and ideologically motivated, non-standard de facto orthographic norms emerge as a result of the medium’s affordances embedded in a given socio-political context. This paper presents a case study on alphabet choice and the use of non-standard orthographic variants on two Serbian news websites, Politika Online and B92. The results show that a two-fold process occurs in Serbian orthographic practices, emerging from Internet discourses from below, including online commentaries: the dominance of the Latin alphabet over Cyrillic; and the stabilization of non-standard Latin orthographic variants. Metalinguistic commentaries of online posters illustrate the tension between pragmatic concerns and language ideologies. Keywords: Serbian; digraphia; Cyrillic; latinization; Internet Slavic; pragmatics of computer-mediated communication; language ideology