The chapter outlines standardization efforts in Romani, where geographical dispersion and the absence of strong community institutions pose challenges to efforts towards unification, status regulation and domain expansion. Initial standardization efforts were localized and partly state sponsored, while others were promoted by networks of activists and supported by civil society initiatives as well as by European governance institutions. Transnational mobility since the mid-1990s, the expansion of electronic communication and the proliferation of both political networking and religious missionary activities among Romani communities have provided incentives and means for domain expansion. Romani literacy is characterized by the use of multiple variants in the choice of dialect and orthography. I show how the key features of ‘standardization beyond the state’, such as the role of networking among multiple actors and pluralism of form, are reinforced through the growing role of multinational institutions, increased mobility and the rise of electronic communication.

In this chapter, we outline the pragmatic issues involved in the analysis of digitally mediated communication. We start with several discursive qualities and implications regarding the range of options for contextualization that the different interfaces exhibit and how users face and overcome digital cues--filtered channels. Then, we move on to more interactive features of digitally mediated communication. Finally, some social aspects of digitally mediated communication are addressed. In the three mentioned areas (discursive, interactive, social), we also seek to explain the role that non-propositional constraints and effects play in the eventual satisfaction with digitally mediated communication, compared to the one that can be found in situations of physical co-presence.

The New Englishes, including many nonstandard varieties, have developed a massive presence in cyberspace, which – as a result – is establishing itself as a sociolinguistic domain in its own right. This domain is partly autonomous and innovative in the way in which speakers respond to the demands and opportunities of the new medium but nevertheless remains connected to the sociolinguistic norms that regulate offline language use in the global “English Language Complex.” From a World Englishes perspective, the specific challenges presented by computer-mediated communication (CMC) are (1) the unprecedented levels of linguistic, textual, and discursive mobility that the new technologies have made possible and (2) the hybrid and multilingual practices that they have encouraged. This new mobility is demonstrated in case studies involving English-lexifier pidgins and creoles from West Africa and the Caribbean and Spanish-English code-switching. The notion of languagescape(s) is proposed to account for the new transnational contacts and connections among standard and nonstandard Englishes that have emerged in the wake of the Digital Revolution.