Project “How to name a social network?”, language: russian
Дата: 2017-12-23
Место: HSE
Научный руководитель: Ivan Levin
Problem: which variants of names of social networks exist in modern Russian language and how the choice among them depends on the style of the speech? Hypothesis: in the formal style those variants which existed since appearance of a social network are more preferable than different derivations. In the informal style – vice versa. Progress: for our project we decided to use some, in our view, the most popular among informants (mainly youngsters, students from Moscow) social networks: VK, Instagram, Telegram, WhatsApp, Viber and Skype. For each network we made two sentences: one in formal style and one in informal. An informant had to put a name of a social network in a gap instead of an official icon of this network. Also we gave them some options: * For Вконтакте: ВэКа, Вконтакт, Вконтакте, Вконтике/Вконтик, ВиКей, в контаче;* For Instagram: инстаграм, инстагрэм, инст, инстик, игэ, инста; * For Telegram: телеграм, телега, тележка; * For WhatsApp: Вотс, Вотсап, ветсап, вазап, васап; * For Viber: вайбер, вибер, виб;* For Skype: скайп, скуп, скупик.Besides, our informants had an opportunity to write their own variants. We separated the formal stimuli and the informal ones in two different lists, so, we got three groups of informants: those who have done the first list and haven't seen the second list, those who have done the second list and haven't seen the first list and those who have done both lists. This separation helped us to investigate if there was a difference between the answers of the people who were able to understand what is the issue of our project (they saw both: formal and informal styles) and the answers of those who saw only one list. We can say that there is no difference, so, we used all the answers equally to make things easier.