Sprachvariationen in Instant Messaging Apps wie WhatsApp. Eine Sprachwissenschaftliche Analyse.

Abstract

Nowadays, due to the ever-increasing digitalisation, an enormous amount of archived speech date came to existence as it has never been seen before. An increasing number of innovative forms of communication occurs, like for example those in virtual communicative spaces as instant messenger chat rooms. The language data analysed in this scientific study were taken from various virtual WhatsApp chat rooms and collected over a two year period. In this context, exemplarily those excerpts of the text corpus were chosen that can reflect specific linguistic phenomena that are of a great importance for digital and multilingual conversations. The specialty and the point that makes this study uniquely positioned in this field of research are the speakers the linguistic data is derived from: The test subjects are part of a Turkish-German, multilingual and multicultural language community. The research hereby deals, beneath a regular rhetoric analysis, especially with interference errors and the code-switching phenomena as well. The intention of this qualitative study is to find out how far the language has internationally been influenced by the progress of digitisation and which changes it has undergone. Hereby, language change and language as a social phenomenon will be discussed and und not only language acquisition in general but also language varieties as youth language, plan language, slang and chat language and its characteristics considered. Especially different kinds of word formation and its specific types of use and contexts of use in the virtual communication space are considered an integral component of the present analysis. Finally, future opportunities to follow up this analysis and an outlook for future developments in this research are will be issued.