What’s up, Switzerland? A corpus-based research project in a multilingual country

Abstract

This paper offers some initial insights into the first large-scale and multilingual corpus of WhatsApp messages for linguistic research and the related research project “What’s up, Swit-zerland?”. Data was gathered in Switzerland in the summer of 2014 and will be made availa-ble to the academic public online at the end of the project (end of 2018). This article presents facts and figures about the corpus and the participants’ demographic data as well as an over-view of (the lack of) existing linguistic research in the field and the research intended in the SNSF-funded research project.