Using Twitter Data for the Study of Language Change in Low-Resource Languages. A Panel Study of Relative Pronouns in Frisian

Jelske Dijkstra; Wilbert Heeringa; Lysbeth Jongbloed-Faber; Hans Van de Velde

doi:10.3389/frai.2021.644554

Using Twitter Data for the Study of Language Change in Low-Resource Languages. A Panel Study of Relative Pronouns in Frisian

Front Artif Intell. 2021 Apr 15:4:644554. doi: 10.3389/frai.2021.644554. eCollection 2021.

Authors

Jelske Dijkstra^{1

2}, Wilbert Heeringa¹, Lysbeth Jongbloed-Faber^{1

3}, Hans Van de Velde^{1

4}

Affiliations

¹ Fryske Akademy, Leeuwarden, Netherlands.
² Mercator European Research Centre on Multilingualism and Language Learning, Leeuwarden, Netherlands.
³ Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Maastricht University, Maastricht, Netherlands.
⁴ Department of Languages, Literature and Communication, Utrecht University, Utrecht, Netherlands.

Abstract

This paper investigates the usability of Twitter as a resource for the study of language change in progress in low-resource languages. It is a panel study of a vigorous change in progress, the loss of final t in four relative pronouns (dy't, dêr't, wêr't, wa't) in Frisian, a language spoken by ± 450,000 speakers in the north-west of the Netherlands. This paper deals with the issues encountered in retrieving and analyzing tweets in low-resource languages, in the analysis of low-frequency variables, and in gathering background information on Twitterers. In this panel study we were able to identify and track 159 individual Twitterers, whose Frisian (and Dutch) tweets posted in the era 2010-2019 were collected. Nevertheless, a solid analysis of the sociolinguistic factors in this language change in progress was hampered by unequal age distributions among the Twitterers, the fact that the youngest birth cohorts have given up Twitter almost completely after 2014 and that the variables have a low frequency and are unequally spread over Twitterers.

Keywords: CMC; Frisian; frequency; methodology; panel study; relative pronoun; t-deletion.