Schnëssen. Surveying language dynamics in Luxembourgish with a mobile research app

Abstract

Abstract The mobile app Schnëssen establishes a digital and participatory research platform to collect data on present-day spoken Luxembourgish through crowdsourcing and to present the results of data analysis to the general public. Users can participate in different kinds of audio recording tasks (translation, picture naming, reading, question) as well as in sociolinguistic surveys. All audio recordings are accessible to the public via an interactive map, which allows the participants to explore variation in Luxembourgish themselves. In the first year of data collection, roughly 210.000 recordings have be collected covering numerous variation phenomena on all linguistic levels. Additionally, over 2800 sociolinguistic questionnaires have been filled out. Compiling such amounts of data, the Schnëssen app represents the largest research corpus of spoken Luxembourgish.