Abstract
The use of social media platforms to communicate has increased in recent years. The users of digital social networks form discourse communities which adopt the values, goals, and communication habits of each other. As a large part of Latvian society is multilingual, individuals with different mother tongues interact daily. Since social media reflects society, code-mixing, i.e., the use of two or more languages in communication, is often observed there. The aim of the study is to conduct an in-depth investigation of code-mixing in social media discourse in Latvia. The object of the study is Tik-Tok videos with instances of English code-mixing in the discourse of Latvian-speaking Tik-Tok users. The research consists of an overview of the sociolinguistic situation in Latvia, description of the contacts between English and Latvian in Latvia in the 21st century, as well as a corpus for the purpose of investigating the features of code-mixing discourse in selected posts and language choice in the context of multilingualism. The methods of this research include analysis of theoretical sources, discourse analysis, statistical analysis, corpus-driven analysis. The corpus consists of 30 Tik-Tok videos, with the following metadata extracted for analysis: length of the videos, gender, and age of speakers. The English lexis is marked manually, then to be placed in a concordance tool to find out the frequency of English lexis present. Each video is investigated separately and as part of the corpus as a whole. The types of code-mixing found in the corpus are intra-sentential, inter-sentential code-mixing and tag-switching.
Author Information
Margarita Dumeša, University of Latvia, Latvia
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