Abstract
For the DiDi project, we studied linguistic behaviour among Facebook users in the multilingual province of South Tyrol by looking at the Facebook texts written by 136 participants from the region. The corpus of texts included status updates, comments and chat messages by Facebook users who were between 14 and 76 years of age and whose L1 was German. We used corpus linguistics methods to analyse (1) the participants’ preferences regarding language use (German, Italian, and English) and (2) dialect use (South Tyrolean dialect vs. standard German) as well as (3) instances of code-switching and code-mixing. The following contribution focusses on young Facebook users. Our results show that young users a) prefer their L1 and produce only a small number of non-German texts, b) that their default variety for Facebook texts is their dialect, and c) that their texts contain instances of code-mixing rather than code-switching. We also compared these results to the linguistic behaviour of older users in the corpus and observed that they had a greater tendency to write texts on Facebook in standard German than younger users.