Exploring the language of Swedish social media: A contrastive corpus analysis

Abstract

This article explores the language of social media by analyzing a selection of linguistic features in four corpora of Swedish social media available at Språkbanken Text: Blog mix, Familjeliv, Flashback, and Twitter. Previous research describes the language of these corpora as informal, spoken-like, unedited, non-standard, and innovative. Our corpus analysis confirms the informal and spoken-like nature of social media, while also showing that these traits are unevenly distributed across the various social media corpora and that they are also present in other traditional written corpora, such as novels. Our findings also reveal that the social media corpora show traits of involved and interactional language.