Publication
Title
Adolescents' social background and non-standard writing in online communication
Author
Abstract
In a large corpus (2.9 million tokens) of chat conversations, we studied the impact of Flemish adolescents' social background on non-standard writing. We found significant correlations between different aspects of social class (level of education, home language and profession of the parents) and all examined deviations from formal written standard Dutch. Clustering several social variables might not only lead to a better operationalization of the complex phenomenon of social class, it certainly allows for discriminating social groups with distinct linguistic practices: lower class teenagers used each of the non-standard features much more often and in some cases in a different way than their upper class peers. Possible explanations concern discrepancies in terms of both linguistic proficiency and linguistic attitudes. Our findings emphasize the importance of including social background as an independent variable in variationist studies on youngsters' computer-mediated communication.
Language
English
Source (journal)
Dutch journal of applied linguistics. - Amsterdam, 2012, currens
Publication
Amsterdam : 2018
ISSN
2211-7245
2211-7253 [online]
DOI
10.1075/DUJAL.17018.HIL
Volume/pages
7 :1 (2018) , p. 2-25
ISI
000441351100002
Full text (Publisher's DOI)
UAntwerpen
Faculty/Department
Research group
Publication type
Subject
Affiliation
Publications with a UAntwerp address
External links
VABB-SHW
Web of Science
Record
Identifier
Creation 07.09.2018
Last edited 15.12.2021
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