Belarusian-language comments on the Tut.by internet forum

Abstract

An article on the characteristics of comments in the Belarusian language posted on the Tut.by forum. At the beginning of the article, the author examines the popularity of the Belarusian language among forum users by compiling the number of Belarusian and Russian-language comments under the most commented articles posted on the forum Tut.by. As a result of the analysis, it was proved that although the Russian language dominates the discussed forum, Belarusian-language comments are present under each of the selected articles. However, since the main goal of the article is to characterize Belarusian-language comments, searching for individual statements under articles seemed to be an ineffective way of collecting a sufficient amount of material. Therefore, it was decided to create a text corpus consisting of a sample of the last 50 entries of 13 Internet users who between January 1 - March 31 2019, posted at least one Belarusian-language post on the Tut.by forum. In this way, a set of texts was created consisting of 890 unique segments, on the basis of which further analysis was carried out. As a result of the research, it was found that Belarusian-language comments are very diverse in terms of their content and form. Although most of the Belarusian-language authors of these posts presented common attitudes, they participated in online discussions on various topics, and their comments differed greatly in terms of linguistic correctness and diligence, the level of emotionality, the way of verbalizing non-verbal signs and the culture of conversation. Therefore, it seems reasonable to conclude that the variety of the Belarusian language researched on the Tut.by forum is very diverse, and the individual skills and preferences of each Internet user plays a decisive role in its form.