“Mein Dream Hotel!” – A Corpus Study on Codeswitching in Genglish TripAdvisor reviews.

Abstract

The present research analyses the use of codeswitching in German-English (also known as Genglish) online customer reviews. It especially looks at the relations between the use of codeswitching and the polarity of reviews, gender and the location of the hotel where the reviewer travelled to. To answer the research questions, a corpus analysis using 120 written consumer evaluations from the website TripAdvisor was conducted. The results suggest that there is no significant relation between the use of codeswitching and the polarity, gender or location. However, an unexpected connection between the number of words and the use of codeswitching and the polarity of the review was found. Reviews with codeswitching are longer than the reviews without codeswitching. Besides reviews expressing dislike) contained more words than neutral reviews and reviews expressing like. These findings aim to give useful insights for the interpretation of multilingual customer reviews. However, further research with different languages have to be conducted. Keywords: Codeswitching, Online reviews, TripAdvisor, Genglish