Using Twitter Data for the Study of Language Change in Low-Resource Languages. A Panel Study of Relative Pronouns in Frisian

Abstract

This paper investigates the usability of Twitter as a resource for the study of language change in progress in low-resource languages. It is a panel study of a vigorous change in progress, the loss of final t in four relative pronouns (dy't, dêr't, wêr't, wa't) in Frisian, a language spoken by ± 450,000 speakers in the north-west of the Netherlands. This paper deals with the issues encountered in retrieving and analyzing tweets in low-resource languages, in the analysis of low-frequency variables, and in gathering background information on Twitterers. In this panel study we were able to identify and track 159 individual Twitterers, whose Frisian (and Dutch) tweets posted in the era 2010–2019 were collected. Nevertheless, a solid analysis of the sociolinguistic factors in this language change in progress was hampered by unequal age distributions among the Twitterers, the fact that the youngest birth cohorts have given up Twitter almost completely after 2014 and that the variables have a low frequency and are unequally spread over Twitterers.

Laughing Online: A Morpho-Semantic Study on Typed Laughter-Derived Expressions Used in Hijazi Twitter and WhatsApp Instant Messages

“…More than half of the total number of tweets are by Saudi (30%) and Egyptian users (20%) (Salem 2017). There have been many linguistic studies done on Twitter in relation to: language change (Dijkstra et al 2021;Bohmann 2016), semantics (Nakov 2018) to name only a few. Out of all the abbreviations and netspeak used in this social platform, this study will be confined to HDA TLDEs in IMs that express online laughter.…”