230089 Language Variation on YouTube (S) (WiSe 2023/2024)

Nowadays, the online video-sharing platform YouTube is responsible for a major share of the world's Internet traffic and, according to YouTube's official statistics, "[o]ver 2 billion logged-in users visit YouTube each month, and every day people watch over a billion hours of video and generate billions of views." (cf. https://www.youtube.com/intl/en-GB/about/press/)
And yet, YouTube data and its platform are virtually absent from (socio-)linguistic research despite the wealth and variety of data provided, e.g. regarding the varieties of World Englishes.
In this seminar, we will take a good look at YouTube from a linguist's point of view by discussing perspectives from media linguistics, computer-mediated communication (CMC), corpus linguistics, and sociolinguistics. We will try to assess whether YouTube is a suitable platform for linguistic research projects and how researchers can navigate YouTube in a meaningful way, before students will develop and conduct their own small-scale research projects on YouTube in the context of variationist sociolinguistic research.

Teilnahmevoraussetzungen, notwendige Vorkenntnisse

Having completed an introduction to linguistics and sociolinguistics (i.e. the BM3 module (old FsBs) / Basis3 module (new FsBs)) will be necessary to ensure successful course completion.

Literaturangaben

e.g.

• Schneider, Edgar. W. (2016). “World Englishes on YouTube: Treasure trove or nightmare?” In E. Seoane & C. Suárez-Gómez (Eds.), World Englishes: New Theoretical and Methodological Considerations (pp. 253–282). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. https://doi.org/10.1075/veaw.g57.11sch