Challenging Folk-Linguistics: Grammatical and Spelling Variation in Students’ Writing in Hebrew on WhatsApp and in Essays

With the increasing use of mobile phones among young people, there is growing public concern about possible detrimental effects of digital writing on learners’ literacy and language skills. We ask whether and to what extent nonstandard forms typical of spoken Hebrew and of digital communication are also found in the formal writing of high-school students. To this end, we compare between two corpora of Modern Hebrew: a naturalistic corpus of 7,120 WhatsApp messages (35,085 words) written by 80 students in three classroom WhatsApp groups and a corpus of 291 school essays (34,700 words) written by 291 students. The findings indicate that a rather clear distinction is maintained between adherence to traditional formal writing in school essays as opposed to a more lenient approach on WhatsApp. The findings thus provide empirical linguistic evidence challenging the predominant folk-linguistic public ideology.