Communication 2.0: Language features of correspondence in the messenger of German-speaking youth of Switzerland

Abstract

The article presents the results of a study of messages from WhatsApp messenger, included in the corpus of the project of Swiss linguists What’s up, Switzerland?, to identify the factors of peculiarity and linguistic features of communication of young people in Switzerland. The focus is on the main factors that determine the features of communication of young users, namely, the linguistic situation of dialect-literary diglossia in German-speaking Switzerland, the reflection on writing of the features of oral youth communication, the influence of Web 2.0 technologies. The analysis of authentic material made it possible to establish that the daily written communication of young people is carried out mainly in dialect, which corresponds to its desire for informal and irregular communication. Along with dialect Swiss youth have in written communication their arsenal of language tools and techniques for the implementation of specifically youth strategies and tactics. When communicating in the messenger, young German-Swiss use a variety of techniques of playing with language and means of delimitation and alienation from the usual, normative. The game with alien linguistic means: the German literary standard, English, ethnolects are most often implemented when communicating in the messenger on the principle of code-switching or mixing different language forms. Important results include the numerous facts of the use of new opportunities and means of digital communication 2.0 identified in the corpus, which is found at the phonetic-phonological, graphic, lexical-semantic, morphosyntactic, and pragmatic levels and persuasively demonstrates the ever-increasing influence of the media environment.