Abstract
Near all Norwegian teenagers own a smartphone and use social media. Chatting with friends is a popular activity and an integrated part of adolescents’ social life. The prevalence of smartphones has exaggerated the expectations of availability and contact and hence impacted written communication and language norms. In her PhD project, Helle Nystad examines linguistic normativity in adolescents’ digital social writing, focusing on characteristic features of chat interactions and how norms are negotiated.
The PhD is part of the larger MultiLit project (Multilectal Literacy in Education), which has completed an extensive fieldwork in three lower secondary schools in Northern, Western and Central Eastern Norway. A large group of researchers and assistants got access to all academic subjects of the 9th grade for a week and completed a variety of data collections – among them, voluntary donations of private chat messages from the adolescents. This work resulted in a chat message corpus – DigSos – curated by HUMIT – Centre of digital development at Faculty of Humanities (UiO).
Employing a mixed-methods approach, the PhD project combines chat message material with focus group interviews with the adolescents. Theoretically, the project draws on interactional and online sociolinguistics to conduct qualitative analyses of the functions of non-standard features and explore of the multiple layers of norms in chat messages among adolescents.
This talk is a summary of the project and discussion of key findings. The project consists of three articles, which are all briefly presented. Followingly, the audience is invited to brainstorm the focus of the discussion chapter in the final dissertation and Kappe. Which questions are most important or interesting to pursue?
Bio:
Helle Nystad is a Doctoral Research Fellow at Faculty of Education, Arts and Sports at Western Norway University of Applied Sciences. She has been affiliated with MultiLing since starting her project in 2023. Nystad’s project is part of the larger MultiLit project – Multilectal Literacy in Education and supervised by Prof. Unn Røyneland and PI of MultiLit Prof. Øystein A. Vangsnes.