Regional dialects of Hungarian in social media: usage and attitudes

Resumen

The paper investigates social media as a linguistic data source for studying regional dialect uses and the attitudes towards it in social media. A significant number of self-collected data is classified and analyzed regarding Hungarian dialects. Although written posts, comments, messages were observed, many regionalisms can be found, even phonetical ones since many situations in social media stimulate informal and less reflected language use. Besides studying different regional phenomena of Hungarian, the paper addresses the topic of language attitudes towards them. Due to many factors of the Hungarian mentality, most speakers represent standard-based and prescriptive viewpoint from which regional dialects are stigmatized even in social media. Finally, the paper highlights the role of social media in developing metalinguistic awareness by users and by direct science communication.