Anthony, Laurence. 2023. AntConc (Version 4.2.4) [Computer Software]. Tokyo, Japan: Waseda University. https://www.laurenceanthony.net/software
Beißwenger, Michael et al. 2019. https://www.mocoda2.de: a database and web-based editing environment for collecting and refining a corpus of mobile messaging interac-tions. In European Journal of Applied Linguistics 7(2). 333-344. https://doi.org/10.1515/eujal-2019-0004
Gilles, Peter. 2015. From status to corpus: Codification and implementation of spelling norms in Luxembourgish. In Winifred Davies & Evelyn Ziegler (ed.), Macro and micro lan-guage planning. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 128-149.
Purschke, Christoph. 2020. Attitudes towards multilingualism in Luxembourg. A comparative analysis of online news comments and crowdsourced questionnaire data. In Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence (3). 1-18. https://doi.org/10.3389/frai.2020.536086
Sebba, Mark. 2007. Spelling and Society: The culture and politics of orthography around the world. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Luxembourgish, primarily a spoken language, has found its ways into the written digital domains, including mobile messaging services such as WhatsApp. The growing presence of Luxembourgish in digital media can be explained by the fact that the language is used more and more as a written language. To this date, Luxembourgish plays a minor role in the national school system and thus only partial knowledge of its orthography can generally be assumed. Following the study of Gilles (2015) and the findings of this research project on digital youth communication in Luxembourg, there is an upcoming awareness of the existence of spelling norms because of the increased presence of Luxembourgish in the public sphere, social media, advertising, and also the interest to write the language correctly (Purschke 2020: 3). In this study, I will demonstrate the systematic norm adherence of young digital writers in Luxembourgish.
Participants of the study – involved as citizen scientists in the data collection process – are in the 12 to 19 age group, are self-described proficient speakers of Luxembourgish and communicate daily digitally. The data is collected through the Mobile Communication Database (short: MoCoDa, see https://www.mocoda.lu for further information), a database for archiving digital text messages. During workshops offered by me in secondary schools with the subject ‘youth communication’, the participants (n = 100) voluntarily donate, anonymize and pseudonymize their manually selected chats. This data is being complemented by the youths with metadata, such as the interactional context, metadata on the chat participants, and their social relations (Beißwenger et al. 2019: 333).
One of the main research questions is: What kind of spelling norms are young Luxembourgish digital writers applying considering they, generally, are unfamiliar with official orthographic rules? The collected data is analyzed by using a mixed-methods approach with the software AntConc (Anthony 2023). Comparing the findings in Gilles (2015) to the first results from this study, there is an overall norm orientation of young digital writers on the spelling of high-frequency words (e.g., auxiliaries, words with the suffix <éieren>, words with vowels in suffixes etc.), which were among the most misspelled words in Luxembourgish from 2009 to 2012. There has been a slight increase in correct spelling from 2004 (first subcorpus chat-room interactions on Internet Relay Chat) to 2012 (second subcorpus: public comments to news stories on RTL.lu) (Gilles 2015: 138). Due to the general growing awareness of existing spelling norms for the Luxembourgish language, the current data shows that tendencies in orthographic correctness have increased even more.
In conclusion, the findings demonstrate that there is a growing norm awareness of correct spelling in Luxembourgish, even in the unregulated orthographic space of text messaging (Sebba 2007). This might be related to the fact that the codification of the Luxembourgish orthography is completed now, and more public and private texts are being largely correctly written and read in Luxembourgish.