Lysbeth Jongbloed-Faber, Frisian on social media. The vitality of minority languages in a multilingual online world

One of the main objectives of this dissertation is finding an answer to the question how language vitality of minority languages and their respective use on social media are intertwined.While work on (West) Frisian in this field is scarce, the topic per se is not new to sociolinguistics.Crystal (2001), for example, outlined a state of an English dominated internet sphere, already some twenty years ago, in which other national languages are still underrepresentednot to speak of small or minority languages.Kornai (2013), on the other hand, after the Web 2.0 has been established, conceptualized a framework for measuring vitality of languages based on their appearance in online content, both created by editorial staff as well as user generated content.This follows the basic assumption that online use of a language reflects that the community is actively adopting their language use to new domains which in fact might be referring to both technical domains as to the domain of written language.However, this work by Jongbloed-Faber offers a pleasant new angle at researching language use on social media as it does not try to find an explanatory model that is generally applicable to every (minority) language.It rather focuses on a Frisian case study of social media language use and possible conclusions that might be drawn from that, acknowledging that certain factors might play different roles in each language community's experience.Strictly speaking, this case study consists of five individual empirical case studies (four of which already have been published as articles).