This article reports on the variable omission of the French negative particle "ne" (the first marker of verbal negation) in synchronous (i.e., real-time) electronic communication environments. Patterns of variation in a corpus of non-educational chat (i.e., free, public-access Internet chat) are analyzed and compared to data produced by first-, second-, and third-year American university students of French in an educational setting. First- and second-year students retained "ne" nearly categorically; third-year students used "ne" five times more often than participants in the non-educational context. Considerable inter-individual variation was observed in the third-year student data, although only one student exhibited native-like patterns of variation. The results are discussed within the broader context of teaching and learning sociolinguistic variation in French as a second or foreign language, with a specific focus on using authentic electronic discourse as one way of sensitizing students to sociolinguistic variation.