Issues about Analysing Multilingual Communication in Immigrant Contexts

Abstract

Multilingual communication is frequently observed in immigrant communities due to contact between and across languages. Linguistic aspects of multilingual communication and the sociolinguistic factors that influence multilingual language use across participants and contexts have been widely studied albeit mostly through spoken and relatively small size data sets. Increasing availability of Internet based services and social media platforms make it convenient to collect publicly available and large-scale textual data for multilingual communication. In addition, availability of computational tools makes digital data attractive for research purposes. However, there are challenges and pitfalls for data scientists to be aware of while collecting and analysing multilingual data in immigrant settings. The goal of this chapter is to inform the reader about issues around multilingualism in immigrant contexts through introducing research questions, data sets and methods of analyses across academic fields (e.g. sociolinguistics and computational areas of research) and highlight the challenges and opportunities for future research.