Institutes & CentersInstitute for Applied Linguistics - Multilingualism and plurilingualism - Projects - DIDI

DIDI

Digital Natives - Digital Immigrants. Writing on Social Network Sites: a corpus-based observation of the current language use in South Tyrol, with particular consideration of the writers' age

In the project DiDi we have analysed the linguistic strategies employed by users of social network sites (SNS). The data analysis focused on South Tyrolean users and we investigated how they communicate with each other. In regions of the German speaking area where dialect is frequently used in different communicative contexts, regional and social codes are often also used in written computer mediated communication. Another interesting but more general aspect of the new media is connected to the emerging linguistic and social practices (new literacy). One of the main research questions in DiDi was whether people of different age use language on SNS in a similar way or in an age-specific manner.

The purpose of the study was:
1. to record the contemporary language use of South Tyrolean German in the new media (cf. the DiDi Corpus)
2. to describe the everyday usage of language of South Tyrolean SNS users with L1 German with respect to their choice of languages and varieties as well as with respect to their usage of specific cmc phenomena.

Please see the "Publications" for detailed descriptions of the project and its results.

Project duration: June 2013 - December 2019
Project status:
Funding:
Provincial P.-L.P. 14. Research projects (Province BZ funding /Project)
Total project budget: €200,392.20
Institute: Institute for Applied Linguistics

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The DiDi Corpus

The DiDi corpus has an overall size of around 650.000 Tokens gathered from 136 South Tyrolean Facebook users who participated in the DiDi project. It consists of 11.102 Facebook wall posts, 6.507 wall comments and 22.218 private messages. All messages were written by the participants throughout the year 2013. Please read the fulldescription of the corpus for further details. Please consider also the description of the method of data collection and the full description of the DiDi project and its research questions.

As every participant could offer either his/her private messages, his/her texts on the wall or both, the corpus comprises wall posts and wall comments from 130 profiles and private messages of 56 profiles; 50 participants granted access to both types of data. Free access to the corpus is given to the wall posts and comments. Due to privacy issues the access to the private messages is restricted. Access to the private messages can be given for scientific research only, after signing a non-disclosure agreement. In case you are interested in the data for scientific reasons, please contact the research team.

All texts were anonymised in order to guarantee that the participants' identity cannnot be infered from the texts. The anonymisation included person names, group names, geographical names and adjectival references, institution names, hyperlinks, mail addresses, phone numbers, numbers of bank accounts, servers, postal codes and other private information. Please, read the anonymisation document for the anonymisation keys.

The corpus offers a vast range of research opportunities for linguists that are interested in CMC in general, and more specific in multilingual language use, the use of regional varieties, code switching, code shifting and code mixing phenomena, etc.

Access to the DiDi corpus via ANNIS: https://commul.eurac.edu/annis/didi

Corpus download via Eurac Research Clarin Centre: https://clarin.eurac.edu/

Scientific Publications

Journal article2023

Dialektale Sprachrealitäten über CMC-Korpora erleben: Das DiDi-Korpus zur internetbasierten Kommunikation aus Südtirol im DaZ-Unterricht

Glaznieks A, Frey JC

Aivars Glaznieks, Jennifer-Carmen Frey

Der Beitrag stellt das DiDi-Korpus zur internetbasierten Kommunikation (IBK) aus Südtirol (vgl. Frey et al. 2016) vor und diskutiert seinen potenziellen Wert für den DaZ-Unterricht. Das Korpus besteht aus etwa 40.000 Facebooktexten von privaten NutzerInnen und zeigt einen authentischen Ausschnitt der schriftlichen digitalen Kommunikation in Südtirol, die sich neben typischen Merkmalen der IBK auch durch die Nutzung mehrerer Varietäten (z.B. Standarddeutsch und Dialekt) und Sprachen (z.B. Deutsch und Italienisch) auszeichnet (vgl. Glaznieks / Frey 2018). Der Beitrag fokussiert auf den schriftlichen Gebrauch mehrerer Varietäten in der IBK und stellt den soziokulturellen und kommunikativ-pragmatischen Mehrwert des DiDi-Korpus als authentische Sprachressource für DaZ-Lernende heraus.

DOI

DOI: 10.48694/kordaf.3839

Inbook2020

Das DiDi‐Korpus: Internetbasierte Kommunikation aus Südtirol

Glaznieks A, Frey JC

Aivars Glaznieks, Jennifer-Carmen Frey

Das DiDi-Korpus ist eine Sammlung von soziolinguistisch und computerlinguistisch aufbereiteten Facebook-Statusmeldungen, -Kommentaren und -Chatnachrichten. Alle Texte stammen von privaten Profilen von 136 Schreiberinnen und Schreibern aus Südtirol und stellen deren gesamte Facebook-Kommunikation des Jahres 2013 dar. Die Schreiberinnen und Schreiber geben überwiegend Deutsch als ihre Erstsprache an (108/136) und verteilen sich auf unterschiedliche Altersgruppen. Neben der breiten Altersspanne der Schreiberinnen und Schreiber (14-74 Jahre) zeichnet sich das Korpus vor allem durch regionale Eigenheiten wie seinem hohen Anteil dialektaler und mehrsprachiger Texte (besonders Deutsch, Italienisch und Englisch) aus. Das Korpus ist frei zugänglich und kann über eine ANNIS-Suchoberfläche durchsucht oder als XML bzw. JSON heruntergeladen werden (https://commul.eurac.edu/annis/didi).

DOI

DOI: 10.1515/9783110679885-019

Inbook2018

Dialekt als Norm? Zum Sprachgebrauch Südtiroler Jugendlicher auf Facebook

Glaznieks A, Frey JC

Aivars Glaznieks, Jennifer-Carmen Frey

For the DiDi project, we studied linguistic behaviour among Facebook users in the multilingual province of South Tyrol by looking at the Facebook texts written by 136 participants from the region. The corpus of texts included status updates, comments and chat messages by Facebook users who were between 14 and 76 years of age and whose L1 was German. We used corpus linguistics methods to analyse (1) the participants’ preferences regarding language use (German, Italian, and English) and (2) dialect use (South Tyrolean dialect vs. standard German) as well as (3) instances of code-switching and code-mixing. The following contribution focusses on young Facebook users. Our results show that young users a) prefer their L1 and produce only a small number of non-German texts, b) that their default variety for Facebook texts is their dialect, and c) that their texts contain instances of code-mixing rather than code-switching. We also compared these results to the linguistic behaviour of older users in the corpus and observed that they had a greater tendency to write texts on Facebook in standard German than younger users.

DOI

DOI: 10.1515/9783110472226-038

Conference proceedings article2017

Connecting Resources: Which Issues have to be Solved to Integrate CMC Corpora from Heterogeneous Sources and for Different Languages?

Beißwenger M, Wigham CR, Etienne C, Fišer D, Suárez HG, Herzberg L, Hinrichs E, Horsmann T,

Egon W. Stemle

The paper reports on the results of a scientific colloquium dedicated to the creation of standards and best practices which are needed to facilitate the integration of language resources for CMC stemming from different origins and the linguistic analysis of CMC phenomena in different languages and genres. The key issue to be solved is that of interoperability – with respect to the structural representation of CMC genres, linguistic annotations metadata, and anonymization/pseudonymization schemas. The objective of the paper is to convince more projects to partake in a discussion about standards for CMC corpora and for the creation of a CMC corpus infrastructure across languages and genres. In view of the broad range of corpus projects which are currently underway all over Europe, there is a great window of opportunity for the creation of standards in a bottom-up approach.

DOI Source

DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.1041877

All Publications

Dialektverwendung in der Alltagsschriftlichkeit: Wie CMC-Korpora für den DaF/DaZ-Unterricht nutzbar gemacht werden können
Glaznieks A (2025)
Presentation/Speech

Conference: Deutscher Germanistentag | Braunschweig | 14.9.2025 - 17.9.2025

Dialektale Sprachrealitäten über CMC-Korpora erleben: Das DiDi-Korpus zur internetbasierten Kommunikation aus Südtirol im DaZ-Unterricht
Glaznieks A, Frey JC (2023)
Journal article
Korpora Deutsch als Fremdsprache

https://doi.org/10.48694/kordaf.3839

Using Data Mining to Repurpose German Language Corpora. An evaluation of data-driven analysis methods for corpus linguistics
Frey J (2020)
PhD thesis

https://hdl.handle.net/10863/17321

Our partners

Südtiroler Kulturinstitut

Project Team

Aivars Glaznieks

Project Manager

Nicole Stuckey

Team Member

Egon W. Stemle

Jennifer-Carmen Frey

Andrea Abel

Scientific Advisory Board

Contact

Access to the DiDi corpus via ANNIS: https://commul.eurac.edu/annis/didi

Corpus download via Eurac Research Clarin Centre: https://clarin.eurac.edu/

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