Halli Hallo meine Lieben, Eeey qué pasa

Eine Analyse der Begrüßungsformeln bei deutschen und spanischen YouTuber*innen

Abstract

Salutation formulas in daily communication are used to create contact between speakers and build a starting point for further conversation. In audiovisual media salutation formulas also have this function to establish the contact between speakers. This is especially the case in YouTube videos, as YouTubers tend to address their audience in a very personal way. The aims of this study are the following: Firstly, finding differences and aspects in common between daily communication and communication on YouTube. Secondly, comparing salutation formulas of German and Spanish YouTubers. In order to achieve this, based on Sosa Mayor’s (2006) work salutation formulas have been devided into the subcategories „meeting formula“, „greeting questions“ and „welcome formulas“. A corpus of Spanish and German YouTube videos has been created to analyze the opening-scenes of those videos. The results of this analysis demonstrate that YouTubers use a far bigger repertoire of formulas than the one described by Sosa Mayor. Other than the function to establish contact they also use the salutation to increase their recognition factor. Furthermore, the analysis shows that the use of greeting questions is significantly higher between Spanish speakers than between Germans.