PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

This chapter investigates the viability of YouTube data for the World Englishes research context by introducing a Namibian YouTuber community and presenting challenges and opportunities of this mostly uncharted medium. An acoustic phonetic case study of Namibian English is conducted with a small sample corpus of YouTube data from 2018, in which vowels relevant to the Southern African context (e.g. nurse, kit, dress, trap) of two groups of content creators are analyzed. While researchers face methodological challenges on YouTube during data collection and analysis, the results of the acoustic analyses presented show that the formal and informal speech styles found on YouTube constitute an accessible and rich type of data that can reaffirm and complement findings based on traditional approaches.