Ke Dise, Mi Arma? Dialectal Varieties in WhatsApp Digital Norm of Andalusian Adolescent Speakers

Abstract

This article analyzes the written expression in WhatsApp-type instant messaging applications of Andalusian adolescents who are in the last years of compulsory education in Spain. It aims to establish the relationship between the most relevant characteristics of the digital norm used by Andalusian adolescents in their communications through WhatsApp and the dialectal characteristics of their variety of Spanish. Additionally, this study intends to determine whether the writing norm in instant messaging applications influences the standard orthography of Spanish in school texts. A quantitative methodology has been used, analyzing objective data and carrying out a systematic and structured information collection process. A descriptive research design was employed using textual content analysis. The results show that the dialectal linguistic identity of Andalusian adolescent speakers on WhatsApp is mainly identified with suprasegmental linguistic features such as intonation and rhythm. Textisms related to the loss of the intervocalic -d- stand out, as well as those which reproduce the different realizations of the phonemes /s/ and /ʝ/. These features characterize the norm used by adolescent Andalusian speakers and coincide with the features that distinguish their way of pronouncing Spanish. The results show that these textisms are not related to the standard orthography of Spanish and do not cause non-standard orthography.

English Code-Mixings in WhatsApp interactions among Spanish adolescents and their orthographic competence

“…The profile of these speakers also shows a trend to mix codes beyond ECM, since they insert in their digital communication non-verbal elements of the multimodal level that strengthen the effectiveness of their CMC through smartphones. Despite the limitation of the small sample size, these results show the same trend with previous research with a similar corpus (Gómez-Camacho et al, 2023a) and may confirm the conclusion that ECM are one of the elements that have been incorporated into the digital norm of Spanish without negative consequences on the communicative competence of young people. We agree with Gómez-Camacho et al (2023b) and Verheijen et al (2020) that the use of ECM and other textisms in young people's digital communication should not be restricted.…”

“…This research uses an exploratory methodology, based on textual content analysis (Neuendorf, 2017;Pérez Paredes, 2020). The sample of the study by Gómez-Camacho et al (2023a) was used for this research, composed of 206 students between 14 and 16 years old who were in the last two years of Compulsory Secondary Education from 12 public higher schools in the region of Andalusia (Spain). The sample was composed of 58.7% females and 41.3% males.…”

“…It has been highlighted, for example, that young Spaniards show a greater tolerance to the use of textisms which do not alter the relationship between phonemes and graphemes (Hunt-Gómez et al, 2020), those based on the creation of neologisms (Núñez-Román et al, 2021) or the ones related to multimodal elements (Gómez-Camacho et al, 2018). On the other hand, recent research confirms that textisms represent intentional discrepancies with the academic norm in the digital context and, therefore, cannot be considered as misspellings that occur due to ignorance of the Spanish language, but rather new forms of language generated using digital technologies (Gómez-Camacho et al, 2023a;2023b;2024).…”