Tuiteamos o pongamos un tuit? Investigating the Social Constraints of Loanword Integration in Spanish Social Media

Abstract

Speakers of non-English languages often adopt loanwords from English to express new or unusual concepts.While these loanwords may be borrowed unchanged, speakers may also integrate the words to fit the constraints of their native language, e.g. creating Spanish tuitear from English tweet. Linguists have often considered the process of loanword integration to be more dependent on language-internal constraints, but sociolinguistic constraints such as speaker background remain only qualitatively understood. We investigate the role of social context and speaker background in Spanish speakers' use of integrated loanwords on social media. We find first that newspaper authors use the integrated forms of loanwords and native words more often than social media authors, showing that integration is associated with formal domains. In social media, we find that speaker background and expectations of formality explain loanword and native word integration, such that authors who use more Spanish and who write to a wider audience tend to use integrated verb forms more often. This study shows that loanword integration reflects not only language-internal constraints but also social expectations that vary by conversation and speaker.