in brief
WhatsAppers like to fit in
Do people writing in Swiss-German dialects write ‘nöd’ or ‘ned’ for ‘not’? A Swiss postdoc in Leipzig has done a WhatsApp analysis that shows how chat partners quickly adapt to the language of their opposite number.
The individuals on the left and right take on each other’s emojis. | Illustration: screenshot of a reconstructed chat from the research project ‘What’s up, Switzerland?’
Social media are providing linguistics researchers with new information. An analysis of 750,000 texts from 600 WhatsApp chats has now shown that people swiftly adapt to the linguistic peculiarities of their opposite number. For this study, Samuel Felder of the University of Leipzig used data from the project ‘What’s up, Switzerland?’.
Among other things, he took a close look at the use of dialect words, emojis and emoticons. He found, for example, that people adopt the dialect of their chat partners over time – perhaps by starting to use the word ‘nöd’ instead of ‘ned’ for ‘not’.
“It was surprising how quickly and radically these changes take place. In some cases, it’s just a matter of weeks”, says Felder. “Until now, there has hardly ever been any evidence of such linguistic shifts over so short a space of time”. His study calls into question the hypothesis that not much changes in our use of language once we’ve reached adulthood.
