Online communities are both global in character, with potential members from all parts of the world, but also local in that the community itself decides on its practices, hence the coining of the term glocal. These practices include the adoption of discourse norms. There are many norms that characterise discourses, and the one focused on here is the reduction of the written form of a lexical item, which characterizes informal more spoken forms of language. This paper presents evidence that reductions are negotiated locally by online communities. The community analysed consists of students on an online MA programme in English Linguistics who are all non-native speakers of English. These students have little experience of Internet communication even in their native languages, and so they are unlikely to be greatly aware of native speaker norms for online discourse. The paper shows that the students negotiate these norms within the group and that crucially their native English-speaking teachers do not have a strong role to play in the adoption of reductions. A number of examples of reductions are presented that are under negotiation by the students. The role of the teacher is analysed as well, and it is shown that 28 students are more likely to adopt a different reduction from the one the teachers use. Thus, this is further evidence that English is not owned by native speakers, but by non-native ones.