The JANES Slovene: Informal, nonstandard, online or, simply, Slovene?

Abstract

The transcript gives an account of the roundtable discussion that took place under the auspices of the conference Slovene On-Line and in New Media, on 27 November, 2015. Five distinguished scholars from the field of Slovene studies had been invited to participate in the roundtable. The main aim was to try and define Slovene as it appears in JANES, the corpus of computer-mediated communication in Slovene. Corpus data shows that language use eludes the existing definitions of Slovene (and other) register-based categorizations, rendering them defunct. Following the onset of the Internet and the development of online text types, is it still possible to preserve the notions of public and private, formal and informal, literary and spoken discourse, as has been the case in Slovene studies? Even more, did these categories in practice (in the curriculum and beyond it) ever really work? The debate touched upon the question how should linguistics go about responding to the changes in language use: should we, first and foremost, establish a new theory of registers, or should we adopt a new disposition towards language users, scientific methodology in Slovene studies, as well as the products and services that are expected of us by the linguistic community? Who is to oversee and govern such an overhaul? What, in the scope of modern linguistic research, is the role of data provided by the JANES project, and where are its main advantages and limitations? The transcript, aiming to provide answers to these questions, is adapted on the basis of the audio recording, with minor adaptions aimed at alleviating reading.