The research project on digital communication among young people in Luxembourg was launched in October 2022 to analyse young people’s language usage from a linguistic perspective. The research field of Luxembourgish linguistics is particularly interested in how young people communicate with one another in digital media nowadays. During workshops held in high schools, students aged 12-19 made available their chats from Snapchat, Instagram, WhatsApp, iMessage and Teams for my research.
For this exhibition, these chats were combined with creative phenomena that actually occur in youth chats to illustrate the current language usage of young people in digital media. The chats were anonymised and left unedited, which is why these short excerpts contain many creative and innovative forms of writing that may only occasionally occur in the entire corpus, in order to showcase as many interesting aspects as possible within a limited space.
Interesting linguistic phenomena can be identified on various levels (such as words, punctuation, sentence structure, foreign language elements and emojis).
When young people communicate via chat, they frequently omit prepositions (Treffe mer eis Gare? [Let’s meet Gare?]), articles (Schéck mer Foto [Send me picture]), and vowels (mrc instead of merci [Thank you]). Therefore, the chat excerpts feature a large number of shortened sentences and abbreviations (dml for deet mir leed [I am sorry]), facilitating brief and quick communication.
Another remarkable aspect is how young people use and manage the different languages they know. Communication in the chats is not restricted to Luxembourgish – other languages, such as English, French, German, Portuguese and Italian, are also present in the collection of chats, known as the corpus. This gives rise to sentences like: “Wann ech casa sinn, fänken ech un“ [I’ll start when I’m casa] (casa comes from Portuguese and stands for home). This highly complex mixed-language environment requires reading skills in several languages, which does not appear to create any comprehension issues for young people.
The project has shown the great diversity of communication among young people and why it is of scientific interest.
This research project is supported by the University of Luxembourg and the Zenter fir d’Lëtzebuerger Sprooch. If you have any questions or would like more information, you can contact the researcher at the following email address: melissa.mujkic@uni.lu.