This article starts by considering some specific problems of the transcription or “writtenization” of speech, at different levels: lexical, morphological and syntactic. These considerations call into question the opposition that is largely taken for granted between speech and writing and show the confusion it can lead to. Based on the MPF corpus (Multicultural Paris French), we show that non-standard utterances raise some already familiar problems of transcription, but also others that are less well-known as they concern so-called emerging phenomena. This begs the question of whether, rather than the speech/writing distinction, the opposition between communicative immediacy and communicative distance would provide a better description and understanding of some linguistic facts found in the corpus.