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Article published In: Dutch Journal of Applied Linguistics
Vol. 7:1 (2018) ► pp.2–25

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Adolescents’ social background and non-standard writing in online communication

 | University of Antwerp
 | University of Antwerp
 | University of Antwerp
Published online: 10 August 2018
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https://doi.org/10.1075/dujal.17018.hil
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.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Operationalization of social background
  • 3.Operationalization of non-standardness
  • 4.Experimental setup
    • 4.1Corpus and participants
    • 4.2Methodology
  • 5.Results and discussion
    • 5.1Level of education
    • 5.2Home language
    • 5.3Profession of the parents
    • 5.4Social background (clustered)
      • 5.4.1Quantitative analysis
      • 5.4.2Group-bound preferences
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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