NETLANG (short form for "InterNET LANGuage") is an academic project, titled "The Language of Cyberbullying: Forms and Mechanisms of Online Prejudice and Discrimination in Annotated Comparable Corpora of Portuguese and English", based at the University of Minho, in Braga, Portugal, and sponsored by FCT (Foundation for Science and Technology - ref. PTDC/LLT-LIN/29304/2017), running between 1 Oct 2018  and 30 Sep 2022.

The project’s research problem is online hate speech. More specifically, it is the expression of prejudice and discrimination on the Internet, involving communicative situations. The problem raises two broad research questions: 

• The first one is what forms and mechanisms hate speech assumes.

• The second is how, or if, these forms and mechanisms vary according to the targets involved.

The answer to the first question will allow us to identify the linguistic (morphological, syntactic, lexico-semantic) properties of the texts, as well as the discursive-pragmatic features of the expression of hate and prejudice in cyberspace.

The answer to the second question will allow us to draw a study of sociolinguistic variation against a continuum of identity factors, such as gender, age, ethnicity, social class and nationality, among others.

The questions must be answered by crossing the sociological profiles of the discoursal targets with the linguistic patterns of the commenters' online written speech.