Lecture: Language variation and digital place-making. How online (language) rooms are constructed, perceived and utilized by German-speaking Twitter users

With an ever-growing public and scientific interest in digital communication, the question arises as to whether and how traditional linguistic sub-disciplines can play a role in analysing patterns of online language use. The proposed presentation thus aims to investigate how the paradigm of Variational Linguistics can be applied to language that has been generated online. The central research question in this context is if the concept of diatopical variation, meaning variation that is linked to a speaker’s place of birth, upbringing or residence, can be applied to digital communication and if so, to what extent and with which consequences.
While traditionally, the internet is regarded as media without clearly defined parameters for space and even criticised for failing to provide spatial orientation to its users, the presented university paper argues that there might be sufficient factors that indeed demarcate online communication spaces in the perception of users. After a brief overview over state-of-the-art research regarding German and English language variation in digital realms, Tim Cresswell’s Theory of Place and the related Place Making-Theory are introduced as a means to conceptualize the construction of a digital sense of place. This is followed by a qualitative corpus study analysing German language Twitter posts regarding use of non-standard language, meta-linguistic remarks and use of metaphors to construct a perception of space.
The results of the analysis show that use of dialectal forms is frequent within the corpus and often occurs in the context of meta-discourse, which comprises various forms of language evaluation. There is some evidence suggesting that perception of space does have an impact on language use. However, the question remains to what extent digital spaces differ from the concept of digital discourse communities.

Info

Day: 2023-05-28
Start time: 15:00
Duration: 00:30
Room: IG 0.457
Track: Sociolinguistics

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