1 Forthcoming in Mark Sebba, Shahrzad Mahootian & Carla Jonsson (Eds.). Language mixing and code-switching in writing: Approaches to mixed-language written discourse. London: Routledge. LINGUISTIC AND DISCURSIVE HETEROGLOSSIA ON THE TRANSLOCAL INTERNET: THE CASE OF WEB WRITING Sirpa Leppänen INTRODUCTION The Internet is an increasingly globalized site for communication. Its globalized nature is manifested in its capacity to connect individuals and groups who can be geographically, culturally and linguistically far apart. The connectedness of the Internet also means that it is now an important channel for the dissemination and appropriation of cultural flows. By such flows I refer here not only to popular cultural fads of an ephemeral nature, but also, more importantly, to the capacity of these flows to mediate and display lifestyles and identity options to which individuals and groups around the globe can subscribe. The Internet has become a powerful mediator of images of cultural globalization, and it now influences the life projects of more people than ever before. Nevertheless, and more importantly for the purposes of this volume, there is yet another, related sense in which the Internet is a globalized space. This has to do with the fact that it is no longer organized solely on the basis of local or national identifications; rather, it is to a large extent characterized by translocality, consisting in both the local and the global (Leppänen et al., 2009). It could in fact be said that the Internet does not simply impose images of cultural globalization on us; it also provides us with opportunities to engage with these images in different ways, and in so doing provides affordances for meaningful social action, interaction and cultural production. In this sense, the Internet can function as a space for “collective imagination” (Beck & Beck-Gersheim 2009, 28) – a space for sharing, discussing, acting upon and critiquing images of globalization. Translocality can be manifested in various aspects of Internet practice, but for the purposes of this volume, its impact on language practices is particularly significant. The translocality of language practices means that Internet users often find it a motivated and meaningful option to draw on resources provided by more than one language (Leppänen et al., 2009). For some people their online multilingual language uses may not, in fact, be very different from their language uses offline. This is the case with for instance bi/multilinguals for whom the Internet is simply one of the settings where they interact with others bi/multilingually. However, there are others for whom the Internet may be a rare or even the only