In contrast with Hablai chileno?, the success of Es de roto probably relates to the fact that, in a carefree and festive tone, it includes references to habits readily identifiable as belonging to the lower classes, but that may also be more or less common across all strata. This allows community members to make fun of the inflexibilities and contradictions of societal norms without ignoring the firm persistence of Chile’s stark social class divisions nor that inequality constitutes a fundamental challenge for the country.

An example of this is a meme posted by community administrators on 16th December 2016 stating: “#Esderoto decir ‘soy tu fanS’” (‘it’s a roto thing to say I am your fanS’), adding a colourful (and hyperbolic) Fansssssssssssszzzz. By July 2019, the meme had reached 5,300 likes, 680 comments and about 800 reposts. The text ironises on the use of the noun fans (with the meaning of ‘admirer’), common among lower- and middle-class Chileans, as singular (instead of the canonical, English-origin form, fan). The questioned term has probably appeared by hypercorrection, that is, because of the tendency of Chilean Spanish speakers to elide the phonemic -/s/ coda, which leads to infer in certain foreign words a sibilant that is later added for corrective purposes. The phenomenon seems to recur in cases of other words of English origin among those who, presumably, are not familiar with speaking the language. For example, in the comments section of the meme, participants mention babysister for ‘babysitter’, and tips (meaning ‘hint’) instead of ‘tip’. Therefore, this document attests how the singular noun fans has become an index of social class in the context of contemporary Chile.

The importance of the case of “soy tu fanS”, however, lies in how it reveals a dimension by which el roto’s attributes acquire a new identity value. Among the most relevant comments is one of a woman who claims to have written on Twitter “I am your fans” to the English-speaking actor Robert Carlyle. Although she says that this also caused her a certain degree of embarrassment, the faux pas loses relevance in the face of true contact between a world-known celebrity and a fans from a remote country. In her comment, the admirer suggests that the communication happened not only regardless of her perceived lack of linguistic abilities, but actually because of them. As a result, when the statement “I am your fans” comes under scrutiny, it is celebrated with enthusiasm, repositioning the figure of the roto within the social scheme, associating it, at least occasionally, to a discourse of cultural pride.

4. Conclusions

Based on the critical reading of Facebook spaces, in this article we have analysed microdynamics of social communication in digital environments that inform about macrosocial schemes of the Spanish language in/from Chile. It was observed, among other things, that when the cuica figure emphasises that she “speaks Spanglish”, she is also highlighting that voices of English origin are considered prestigious in her social environment and that she incorporates them as key elements to legitimise her identity. The ideology of authenticity (Woolard, 2007) is here permeated with the need to defend the limits of social class. On the other hand, after one roto says “I am your fans”, there is further evidence of their supposed cultural inferiority, due to their lack of knowledge of how to use words of English origin in the Chilean context.

The contrast between both linguistic operations is decisive for an unequal distribution of symbolic resources, whose fundamental inequity is not necessarily established by a formal authority or by institutional decisions. As Bourdieu (1984) suggests, the reproduction and control of linguistic capital occur according to processes that create distinction on the