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Recent research in linguistic anthropology has shown the importance of linguistic ideology as it provides a mediating link between social structures and forms of talk through the study of beliefs about language that can be either explicitly formulated or incorporated into speech practices (Woolard and Schieffelin 1994). Having become a key issue in linguistic anthropology, linguistic ideology is widely documented in metapragmatic discourse produced during interviews as this type of situation is expected to be the locus of such beliefs. However, because this approach is ex post, we argue that it can only describe the gap between the speakers’ beliefs about their language(s) and their practices. If we are to study linguistic ideology, we will need to scrutinize the interactions themselves and deal more specifically with their metapragmatic level, where the process of linguistic ideology is at stake. This is what this paper attempts to do. Based on a corpus of video-recorded computer-mediated interactions in the cybercafés of Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar, we focus on the interactional problems that may arise when people use Instant Messaging (IM). These problems can be related to the forms of writing as well as to the languages used (Malagasy, French, or Variaminanana, a form of code-mixing of Malagasy and French). Although we take into account the metapragmatic discourse, it is not as central as in studies that address the issue of linguistic ideology.