Digital youth communication in Luxembourg — The Association Specialists
  1. Schedule
  2. SESSION 2: Language, media, and technology A
  3. Digital youth communication in Luxembourg

Digital youth communication in Luxembourg (20284)

Melissa Mujkić 1
  1. Insitute for Luxembourgish Linguistics and Literature Studies, University of Luxembourg, Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg

This presentation focuses on the youth’s informal digital language practices with Luxembourgish as the base language from the perspective of innovation and creativity. Due to Luxembourg’s multilingual setting (Gilles 2023), insertions from different languages, such as Luxembourg’s other administrative languages French and German, the languages of the minorities in Luxembourg, such as Portuguese and Italian, and also English, which is becoming more and more popular due to the use of streaming services and social media, are also included in the analysis.

The main focus of this research study is the analysis of how the youths write digitally. For this purpose, the researcher creates a corpus with youths who are involved as editors and donators of their private WhatsApp-chats (Beißwenger et al. 2019). The data is collected through the Mobile Communication Database (short: MoCoDa, see https://www.mocoda.lu/c/home), a database for archiving text messages (Beißwenger et al. 2019).

The writer’s multilingual backgrounds, the lack of knowledge in Luxembourgish orthography (Gilles 2023), the ability to mix and switch between multiple languages, will emphasize the creative and aesthetic aspects of the written language in the text messages. Additionally, the sociolinguistic factors (e.g., age, gender, language competencies, educational level) also have an impact on language variation, linguistic diversity, change, register and style in the CMC interactions.

The data already collected reveal that the youths are willing to experiment and exploit the creative potential in digital writing (Deumert 2014). The digital interactions are characterized by variation (e.g., *werwa instead of firwat – 'why'), innovation (e.g., *cwuuiiinge – 'cringe'), code-switching and code-mixing (e.g., here with Luxembourgish and English: Nah dat ass pain – 'No this is pain'), omission of prepositions (e.g., *Basste park – 'Are you park'), language contact (e.g., here interference with German in verb conjugation: (du) kannst instead of (du) kanns – 'you can'), etc.

  1. Gilles, P. (2023). Luxembourgish. In S. Kürschner & A. Dammel (Eds.), The Oxford Encyclopedia of Germanic Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  2. Beißwenger, M. et al. (2019). https://www.mocoda2.de: a database and web-based editing environment for collecting and refining a corpus of mobile messaging interactions. In European Journal of Applied Linguistics 7 (2) (pp. 333–344). Berlin & New York: De Gruyter.
  3. Deumert, A (2014). Sociolinguistics and Mobile Communication. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.