What’s Up, Switzerland? Language, Individuals and Ideologies in mobile messaging

Simone Ueberwasser & Elisabeth Stark
Universität Zürich

In dem SNF-finanzierten Sinergia-Projekt What’s up, Switzerland? (2016-2018) untersuchen vier Doktorierende und zwei Postdocs erstmals anhand einer grossen Datensammlung den Sprachgebrauch in WhatsApp Nachrichten und den Mediendiskurs darüber in allen vier Landessprachen. Die Forschung basiert auf einer Sammlung von 617 authentischen Chats (ca. 5.5 Mio Wörter), die von der Schweizer Bevölkerung 2014 zur Verfügung gestellt wurden. Die untersuchten Aspekte reichen von grammatischen Phänomenen bis zum Metadiskurs über WhatsApp in den schweizerischen Medien, um die sprachlichen und diskursiven Eigenschaften einer omnipräsenten Kommunikationsform zu erfassen und besser zu verstehen.

With the advent of mobile phones, the way in which people communicate has drastically changed over the past decades and given rise to new forms of informal written communication, not least due to the option of sending text based messages. At the beginning of the century, SMS was the only technology available. It was also the focus of previous research in the sms4science project (the corresponding database is now available for any type of research - www.sms4science.ch), but nowadays, the availability of smartphones and apps has resulted in uncountable new options and features. The best known and most used application is WhatsApp, which allows for much more than simply exchanging text-based messages, which is in the focus of our current SNSF-funded research project (CRSII1_160714). However, almost nothing is known on a large-scale level about the features of WhatsApp communication and the media discourse about its use, thus we, as linguists and discourse analysts, have systematically started to describe linguistic features, graphic variation and (meta)discursive aspects of this new form of communication, with a focus on the Swiss national languages. […]