What kind of economic goods are languages? They are “hypercollective” goods: the more people use them, the greater their use value to all users. People prefer to learn languages with more speakers and will abandon languages which are losing speakers. Culture, defined as the sum total of all texts recorded in a given language, becomes inaccessible if that language goes extinct. The conservation of language and culture thus raises dilemmas of collective action. The world’s thousands of language groups are linked by multilingual speakers. These links constitute a global language system. Exchange of texts between the major and minor language groups in this system proceeds on highly unequal terms.

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.