Whatsapp Conversations: A New Genre Between Orality and Writing?

Abstract

In this paper, we analyze a 500,000-words corpus of WhatsApp messages in Catalan, produced by young couples aged between 18 and 22 years old. The aim of the resercah is to describe its proximity to the colloquial conversation genre and to define the WhatsApp message genre from the point of view of its connexion to the oral-written medium, following Gregory and Carroll (1978). To do so, we contrasted the corpus obtained with the characteristics of the genre colloquial conversation previously described by other researchers. The results show that WhatsApp messages are close to colloquial conversation. Finally, we propose that a new category should be added to Gregory and Carroll’s proposal (1978): a written genre conceived as if it were a spontaneous conversation.