Multilingual Instant Messaging in Finland: WhatsApp in Finnish Swedish digital communication
Instructions for chat donation
- Donate a chate
- Open chat in the WhatsApp-app
- Click Settings > More > Export Chat > Include media
- Email the material to mmwah(at)hanken.fi
- Consent to research paricipation
- Answer short questionnaire on your linguistic background (approx. 5 min.)
- Edit the donation (if need be)
The research team will anonymise the donated material once informed consent has been collected from each chat participant. The participants may remove data that they do not want to be included in the research from the donated material before the processing of the data has begun.
What chats are eligible for donation?
Friend chats, school chats, sports team chats or similar are all suitable for the MMWAH corpus. As long as we can contact the individual chat participants for consent, you can donate any chat you wish. It may be worthwhile to double-check with the other chat participants before submitting your donation to increase the chances of a successful donation!
Our goal is to capture Finnish-Swedish language use, but this does not mean that the chat necessarily has to be in Swedish. Chats in other languages are also welcome, as long as the research team can safely anonymise the chat.
However, chat participants must be at least 15 years old to consent to participate in the research. In the case of younger participants, the consent of their guardians is required.
The chat may contain multimodal elements such as images, videos or audio messages. These will be anonymised and/or replaced with code.
Digital communication drives linguistic innovation
Language is constantly evolving and as 'digital natives', the younger generations of speakers are driving a new wave of linguistic change. New generations reform our way of using languages and due to the development of digital tools, these changes are occurring at ever faster speeds. Multilingualism is becoming the expected norm and the lines between spoken and written languages are getting blurry. We find that these trends are valuable and worth researching and documenting.
The project Instant Messages in Multiple Languages: WhatsApp in Swedish digital communication in Finland will result in the compilation of the corpus MMWAH - Mulilingual Multimodal WhatsApp Corpus at Hanken. We will collect data on the languages use of young Swedish-speaking adults in computer-mediated communication.
The project has been financed by Svenska Kulturfonden.
Our vision
The goal is to create a corpus, i.e. a processed text collection. It will be available for linguistic research, language technology and marketing and many other fields. By participating in the research project you will also make a contribution to a better understanding of current language change, multilingualism in practice, code-switching, and the long-time conservation of language.
The collected data will be processed, anonymised and made available online according to the principles of GDPR and Open Science. Donor safety is key and the donor will be in control of all their donated material. Informed consent will be collected of all participants in each chat donation.
Our aim is to document the nature of language use and not the content in itself, i.e., How something is said is our concerns instead of What is said. If you have a WhatApp chat, either group chat or 1-on-1, that you want to donate to our project, instructions for donations are found at the top of the page.
Publications
Sources
AudienceProject. 2020. AudienceProject Insights 2020. App and Social Media Usage. Tillgänglig: https://audienceproject.com/wp-content/uploads/AudienceProject_Study
