Latgalian as Latvian language regional variety is not widely used in Latvian media and on internet including social networking websites and blogs. There are only some websites and homepages on “Facebook” (FB) fully or partially in Latgalian.
Two FB homepages (Latgaļu vyspasauļa gudreibu olūts ‘Global wisdom source of Latgalians’ and Latgaļu humors I dzeivis gudreibys ‘Latgalian humor and wisdom of life’) publish humorous and entertaining messages—well-known national/regional sayings, jokes, and quotations from various informative, scientific, literary, cinema, and music worldwide texts about life, personal and social relations, politics, etc.—which are written, rewritten and modified by administrators and commented by readers creating new folklore on the internet (Rusell 2011). The various texts are adapted and applied to actual contemporary Latvian/Latgalian situations rewriting the well-known stories and inserting into new contexts.
Messages are in Latgalian, but also in Latvian, Russian and English and in different modes (textual, visual, aural). They extend both the boundaries of meaning-creation tools and of language usage which is restricted in other domains of language use in Latvia (Pošeiko 2017). Whereas comments show readers’ thoughts on folklore and language issue (text content, language use) in terms of folk linguistics (Niedzielski, Preston 2000, Lazdiņa 2014).
The aim of the presentation is to characterize the new Latgalian folklore and comments on it in FB discussing them in terms of:
- flexible time-space, multilingualism and multimodality. How have languages, visual and audial tools been combined in the published texts? How have the texts been modified from different times and spaces and transformed into the Latvian social context?
- linguistic and cultural attitude toward the Latgalian language, folklore, and culture. What do readers think about these texts, the Latgalian language (usage, spelling, grammar, lexis), mode and code switching, audio and visual resources used by them?
References
Lazdiņa, S.(2014). „A kuo tu vari izskaidruot volūdu?” Folklingvistika jeb nevalodnieku devums valodniecībā (Baltinavas lauka pētījuma piemērs). Baltu Filoloģija, XXIII(2). 51–74.
Pošeiko, S.(2017). The development of Latgalian written language. Language situation in Latvia: 2010–2015. Rīga: LVA. (Processing).
Russell, F.(2011). Newslore: Contemporary Folklore on the Internet. University Press of Mississippi.
Niedzielski, N.A., Preston, D.R.(2000). Folk Linguistics. De Gruyter Mouton.
