Digital Discourse Database

Number of Posts: 3
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«What’s Up, Switzerland? »: Spenden Sie Nachrichten für die Forschung

(“What’s Up, Switzerland?”: Donate messages for research)

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Newspaper | Aargauer Zeitung
Date | 1.6.2014
Language | German
Country | Switzerland
Topic Tags | research/study, texting, What's up Switzerland, WhatsApp
Summary | Language researchers from various Swiss universities (Neuchâtel/ Zürich/ Bern) are asking the public to submit their WhatsApp messages for research purposes. German, French, Italian, and Romansh submissions will be accepted and the WhatsApp data will be compared to SMS data collected between 2009-2011. The researchers are further interested in whether there are communicative differences in WhatsApp messaging between speakers of different languages or regional dialects.
Image Description | Screenshot of three icons: WhatsApp, Skype, and Dropbox.
Image Tags | Dropbox, logo, Skype, WhatsApp

Der Punkt stirbt aus – wegen Messengern

(The period is dying out – because of messenger)

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Newspaper | 20 Minuten
Date | 12.6.2016
Language | German
Country | Switzerland
Topic Tags | language threat, texting
Summary | Most people do not put a period at the end of their messages. It is pretty self-evident where sentences end in text messages, argues linguist David Crystal. When a user does add a period at the end of a message, it is a way to give the message more weight, to convey irony or discontent. An opposing trend can also be observed, namely over-punctualization by adding several exclamation or question marks. Teachers are being advised to be very cautious when correcting their students in cases like these.
Image Description | Series of two photographs: WhatsApp conversation and picture of Linguist David Crystal.
Image Tags | male(s), WhatsApp

Wir wollen zeigen, dass wir gut Englisch können

(We want to show that we are good at English)

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Newspaper | 20 Minuten
Date | 29.4.2016
Language | German
Country | Switzerland
Topic Tags | anglicisms, code-switching, emojis, texting, WhatsApp, youth
Summary | Young people increasingly communicate in English with each other (especially digitally). This has become a way to imitate their idols, who are largely English-speakers, and to exclude adults from their communicative code. Linguists are delighted by young people's creativity; they use different languages and emojis available to them even though their competence may not be perfect.
Image Description | Series of four screenshots of WhatsAspp conversations showing English/Swiss-German code-switching.
Image Tags | WhatsApp

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