part of the ruling classes in the broader context of society. These processes transform acquired social habits into impulses perceived as characteristic of the individual personality, such as taste in music or preferences on clothing. Impulses are naturalised in people’s lifestyles thus forming habitus, while simultaneously becoming indices that codify social class, as well as modes of domination. In this regard, the rejection of Chile’s upper class to the word mami (and to reggaetón) constitutes a tactic of distinction that separates such class from the habitus of the popular classes, underlining a difference that goes beyond culture as it becomes part of the realm of power relations.

It has also been observed here how the tactic of distinction is coupled with the preeminence of forms felt as “correct” or “superior”, in apparent adherence to an ideology of the standard language (Milroy, 2001). Something peculiar about the cases seen, however, is that the members of Chile’s ruling class do not seem to necessarily identify the transnational standard of Spanish with their own linguistic variety and they actively neglect purist demands on the part of the academic authority, in particular with respect to the use of words of English origin. Possibly, close adherence to the transnational norm –i.e. an anonymous and transparent Spanish– regulated by language academies, is less useful for marking social class in Chile, contrary to what happens, for example, in Peru (De los Heros, 2012) or Colombia (Chaves-O’Flynn, 2017). Significantly, although these countries’ main language varieties are considered “superior”, they are not necessarily felt as a linguistic model by the Chilean population (Rojas, 2012c).

This paper also reports the appearance of a trope of pride that criticises the ideological Eurocentrism of the Chilean national project, as it revalues the linguistic and cultural singularities of the popular classes of mestizo origin and the Mapuche community. In this regard, pride is located less in discourses that are functional to the traditional sense of the nation (historically driven by Chilean elites) and more in the deployment of emerging demands from historically marginalised groups. In accordance with this tendency, the celebration of the linguistic identity of the roto on Facebook and the success of Kimeltuwe’s Mapudungun revitalisation project, both provide evidence of a constitution of new political subjects in the contemporary context. This is akin to processes where ideologies of pride have also been articulated in other countries, for example, in French-speaking communities in Canada (Heller and Duchêne, 2012).

For its part, the anonymous, transparent Spanish naturalised in Chile’s educational system, sustained by the symbolic asymmetries of the pan-Hispanic model of linguistic authority, is rarely questioned in its hegemonic status. An exceptional case is found in the Facebook group Hablai chileno? which, in a rather marginal way, has sought to question and subvert the presuppositions of such asymmetries by using the same substance that constitutes them: the production of language discourses with social legitimacy. Notably, no other findings revealed initiatives leading to a rethinking of the authority model around the national language, not even contemporary mobilisations around political-linguistic issues, such as the problem of sexism in language and the strategies to combat it.

In this regard, the tracking stage also led to further relevant information. It showed evidence of the relatively low mobilisation around Spanish language policies in Chile, which demonstrates a possible depoliticisation and a minimisation of sociolinguistic problems as important within the nation. This phenomenon occurs in the population that participates in social media, as well as academic institutions, universities, and government organisations. However, this gap is probably also influenced by the relatively new nature of networks such as Facebook. As the use of these networks as primary means