From Fringe to Infrastructure: A Researcher’s Journey through South Slavic Language Attitudes on Social Media

Abstract

This paper presents a bottom-up approach to building a comprehensive infrastructure for the analysis of user-generated content for several South Slavic languages (Slovene, Croatian, Serbian). The goal of this collaboration was to leverage the available knowhow and language similarity in order to provide language resources and tools for the study of netspeak for all three languages in parallel and with minimal resources. We demonstrate the usefulness of the developed infrastructure for a corpus-based, comparative sociolinguistic investigation of language attitudes by Slovenian, Croatian, and Serbian Twitter users, who have witnessed a rapid codification divergence and reinforcement of national languages after the dissolution of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s.