Mapping the spread of Dutch non-standard language use on corporate Facebook pages : a corpus-based analysis of service-oriented interaction

While Dutch non-standard language use has been studied in oral communication (e.g. Ghyselen 2016) and private chat conversations (e.g. De Decker 2014), little attention has been devoted to non-standard language in a broad sense in online public written communication. We focus on one communicative setting, i.e. complaint management on corporate Facebook pages, since the linguistic wrapping of both consumer feedback and company responses has a considerable influence on the outcome of the interaction between both parties. In addition to providing insights for future webcare research, we aim to contribute to the general discussion on nonstandard language variation in Flanders. Based on a self-compiled corpus of approximately 300.000 words of consumer-company interactions taken from 8 corporate Facebook pages (in the fields of public transport, online retail and telecommunications), we investigate to what extent typical features of informal online communication via social media spill over into more sensitive contexts of complaint management. We do so quantitatively by mapping the presence and frequency of old and new vernacular features (Androutsopoulos 2011) in consumer-initiated posts, company replies and consumer to consumer interactions via Python-based scripts and manual filtering. The searches were based on an overarching framework of 28 old (e.g. final –t deletions) and 13 new vernacular (e.g. chatspeak abbreviations) features, which we derived from existing taxonomies (e.g. Lybaert & Delarue 2017, Taeldeman 2008, De Decker 2014, Hilte et al. 2017). Although most consumer and company messages were in large part written in Standard Dutch, fairly high frequencies were found for some of the new vernacular features (e.g. one in four consumer messages contained flooding of punctuation symbols (e.g. ?? or !!!). Consumers predominantly use new vernaculars for expressive compensation, while companies appear to have incorporated them in their responses to consumer feedback (especially emoji and English insertions) as ways to make their communication more conversational and engaging (cf. conversational human voice, Kelleher 2009), and to support their desired brand identity. In contrast, old vernacular features rarely occur in the dataset. This suggests a different status of old and new vernaculars, where the former are deemed less appropriate or functional in this communicative setting for both companies and customers. Despite the often informal register of the customer messages, Standard Dutch still seems the preferred or safer option for company-addressed posts while companies, too, cling to Standard Dutch as the benchmark for professional written communication in this context (in line with De Cock’s study on written public media (2013)). This raises questions regarding the attitudes of Flemings towards old and new vernacular features in this context, as well as their impact on dimensions such as credibility. Additionally, it is yet to be confirmed whether the positive attitudes towards spoken tussentaal (e.g. Lybaert 2017) also apply in written communication. Since this study was limited to a descriptive approach, we hope to answer these questions and provide further evidence for our findings in future experimental research. References Androutsopoulos, J. (2011). From variation to heteroglossia in the study of computer-mediated discourse. In: C. Thurlow & K. Mroczek (red.), Digital Discourse: Language in the New Media. Oxford: OUP. De Cock, T. (2013). Een grens overschreden? Geschreven tussentaal in publieke media. Master’s thesis: Universiteit Gent. De Decker, B. (2014). De chattaal van Vlaamse tieners: een taalgeografische analyse van Vlaamse (sub)standaardiseringsprocessen tegen de achtergrond van de internationale chatcultuur. Doctoral dissertation, Universiteit Antwerpen Ghyselen, A. (2016). Verticale structuur en dynamiek van het gesproken Nederlands in Vlaanderen. Een empirische studie in Ieper, Gent en Antwerpen. Doctoral dissertation, Universiteit Gent. Hilte, L., R. Vandekerckhove & W. Daelemans (2017). Modeling non-standard language use in adolescents' CMC: the impact and interaction of age, gender and education. In: E.W. Stemle (red.). Proceedings of the 5th Conference on CMC and Social Media Corpora for the Humanities. Bolzano, Eurac Research, 11-15.

Publication year:2019

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