Abstract
This paper examines and compares Danes’ and Lithuanians’ code-switching on Facebook. Currently Facebook is one of the most popular social media platforms, where a lot of human communication occurs. The language on such platforms is similar to spoken language in its informality, yet it is written and is therefore at least somewhat planned. This research was carried out by collecting status updates and their respective comments from Facebook profiles of six well-known people (three people from each country) and their followers. Based on the quantitative and qualitative analyses, it seems that the way Lithuanians and Danes switch codes is mostly universal and used to achieve similar purposes. The most common foreign language for code-switching in each dataset was English. Both Danes and Lithuanians switched between their respective native and foreign languages in order to mark discourse, emphasize a point, attract reader’s attention, show identity and refer to a different context. However, while code-switching between the native language and English was used for all these purposes, other languages were chiefly used to refer to different cultural contexts. In the future, more research on how Lithuanians code-switch on Facebook could be carried out, possibly focusing on smaller groups of people, and thus being able to make ethnographic observations.
Highlights
In the last decade there has been an increase in the use of social media platforms for public peer to peer communication
From the figures it is evident that Lithuanians code-switched more than Danes, where 15% of all comments and status updates in the Lithuanian data included code-switching, compared to 7% of such comments and status updates in the Danish data
I have attempted to compare how Lithuanians and Danes use code-switching on Facebook
Summary
In the last decade there has been an increase in the use of social media platforms for public peer to peer communication. With Facebook being one of the most popular of such websites, it provides a rich source of sociolinguistic data ripe for analysis. The language on these platforms is in between the written and the spoken language, being both informal and, to some degree, planned. This creates new possibilities to construct one’s identity, because one can be naturally informal and plan this informality at the same time. The construction of self-image is a huge part of social media and language plays a major part in this process. In order to answer these questions, I performed quantitative and qualitative analysis of Facebook posts and comments made by Danes and Lithuanians from 31 August 2015 to 6 September 2015 on Facebook walls of three well-known Lithuanians and three well-known Danes
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