Dave in 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

Up next is Daniel Cunliffe "Exploring the presence of #Cymraeg on TikTok" at #CLIDA2024

Beginning with a question: why might TikTok matter (for Welsh)?
Children aged 7-11 in Walkes are already using social media a few times a week or everyday (ranginge from 30% of 7 year olds to 65% of 11 year olds).

Nearly 90% of children in Wales use electronic devices to watch videos.
79% percent of people aged 15-24 use TikTok, an average of 69 minutes per day.

Apr 9, 2024 at 9:09amWeb
Show threadDave in 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿Apr 9, 2024
Following Mila-Garcia and Tudela-Isanta's work on Catalan, Cunliffe in may of 2023 collected 200 TikToks taggged wtih a hashtag related to #Cymraeg. 70 Accounts represented, with 2 'super producers' producing about 60 of the videos, but most accounts posting only one video in the dataset. The biggest producers have tens of thousands of followers and millions of likes on the sampled videos.
Show threadDave in 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿Apr 9, 2024
Cunliffe presents a table showing that 20% of the videos included learning, 29% of the videos included meta-linguistic discussions, while the remainder fit into a single code from Schellewald (2021). For example, comedic, documentary, communal, explanatory, interactive.
Show threadDave in 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿Apr 9, 2024
Cunliffe: Vids were tagged with between 0 and 34 hashtags (aside from those used to select for videos for the corpus). Lots of tags had to do with languages and learning or Wales. 26 videos included "Celtic" as a hashtag as well.
Show threadDave in 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿Apr 9, 2024

Cunliffe: Half of the videos only used English for the video description. Only 23 videos only contained Welsh; 52 included only English; most were bilingual!

Now Cunliffe is giving an overview of a video by a Welsh rapper promoting a song in Welsh, with preface and epilogue audience-directed messages in English.

Show threadDave in 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿Apr 9, 2024

Cunliffe: Number of views in the sample ranged from 200 to 6 million, likes ranged from 12 (twelve) to 380k, and comments from 0 to 4.7k. Means were 167k, 17k, and 350, respectively. Only 9 videos had *no* comments.

Recall, of course, that this is *not* a representative sample--just the top 200 videos found for Welsh-related hashtags. But it's interesting to look at how much this video-platform involves text-based comments.