This study investigates the use of written dialect among adolescents from four different locations in Norway, each representing one of the main dialect areas of the country (north, central, west, and east). The data are drawn from the larger study Multilectal Practices in Social Media where a total of 1532 students from 42 different upper secondary schools in all regions of Norway have completed an online questionnaire about their language competence, use and attitudes and where they have also provided short text samples of how they would have written in four imagined situations: (i) a cinema invitation to a friend, (ii) a social media post about the family’s new pet, (iii) a message to the teacher informing him/her about absence due to illness, and (iv) a bio in a discussion forum. In our data we see that the cinema invitations contain a high degree of local/regional dialect features as well as other deviations from standard orthographical conventions whereas the messages to the teacher by and large are written in one of the two Norwegian written standards. Choice of platform also seems to influence the choice of features: messages to the teacher by SMS or Snapchat typically contain more dialect and other deviations from standard orthography than messages sent through the official learning management system of the school. For each of the four locations we evaluate the dialect writing against known features of the local/regional dialect, and we see that not all dialect features make their way into the students’ dialect writing, a fact which we take to reflect changes in progress. In conclusion, we see that the students are very flexible and adaptive in their choice of features and codes in different situations and for different purposes.
