Microblogging in Denmark and Poland — a contrastive analysis. Part II.

This article is the second part of a comparative study of Danish and Polish tweets, inspired by the anthology “Microblogs global”. The first part of the study deals with the social network and microblogging tool Twitter, including the more technical side of microblogging. The many tweet types and the extensive terminology in the field were thoroughly and conscientiously explained. In addition, the contrasts concerning orthography and spoken language were analysed. For the following description, 320 Danish and 320 Polish tweets were collected from randomly selected profiles belonging to various politicians, journalists, and private individuals posting mainly in Danish/ Polish. The analysis covers the period from 30 March to 6 April 2019, and includes differences in tweets in terms of word preference, e.g. colloquialisms, anglicisms, or profanity, to technical and linguistic reductions and the structure of sentences. The degree of graphostilistics in relation to emojis, emoticons, smileys, and iteration is analyzed. Interaction operators are investigated, as well as functional aspects of tweets, i.e. whether tweets can be categorized as messages, comments, statements, or questions. The greatest contrasts occur in such domains as reduction, graphostylistics, and interaction. While the Polish corpus contains only 15 short forms/composites/abbreviations, the Danish corpus contains 3 times more such words (51 examples). Differences in graphostilistics concern above all the number and types of emojis. In addition, emoticons are repeated or concentrated only in the Danish tweets. The divergences in vocabulary and syntax are almost imperceptible