productive units in themselves (Gal and Woolard, 2001b). In this regard, we decidedly engage in a complexity paradigm of sociolinguistic analysis (Blommaert, 2014), which understands its object as permanently mutable, unlimited, polycentric, multidirectional, and unpredictable. In accordance with this vision, the present work does not aim to reduce complexity or concentrate it in static models but to demonstrate it and make it visible.

The qualitative nature of the present analysis, however, does not minimise the value of the absences and gaps in the corpus. Furthermore, it also incorporates a quantitative dimension as it indicates the zero value of some language phenomena. As seen below in this paper, the absence or presence of certain representations is highly informative of how the Spanish language is configured in the Chilean context, particularly if put into perspective together with other areas or scales of the Spanish language or other transnational languages.

During the initial exploration stage, before this study, documents were collected from Facebook groups and pages from three moments: immediately before, during and after 2009-2010, 2013 and 2017 Chilean presidential elections. These temporary closures helped to find testimonies of the gradual emergence of social networks and their broader impact as well as the rising political weight of historically marginalised groups, especially through digital multimodalities, in periods of intense national political debate.

Facebook was chosen as a data source rather than other virtual spaces of digital interpersonal communication (i.e., WhatsApp, Twitter, Instagram, or others) mainly because in the 2010s it had visibly emerged as the social network with the highest penetration worldwide. According to the British weekly newspaper The Economist (20th July 2019), by mid-2018 Facebook had easily exceeded 2 billion users and, unlike previous moments, a significant proportion of them are elderly. This is consistent with a moment when Facebook’s influence is reaching politics on both global and local scales. In the 2010s, protests and social movements from all over the planet, of all political tendencies, have used Facebook as a key platform for articulation and mobilisation: both Alt-Right movements and Black Lives Matter in the United States; the protests that triggered the so-called Arab Spring in the Middle East and the Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong; or the movements Me Too and Ni una menos. Similarly, in Chile, Facebook has been and is used by the most diverse sectors of the national society, and its impact on modes of association and cultural production is immense. For this investigation, the most favourable characteristic of Facebook lies in its capability to enable the constitution of interest groups specifically focused on community initiatives and the management of their own social and political projects (Phyak, 2015; Blommaert et al., 2009). This helps collect evidence regarding what interests concur in a given social environment. Those who participate in Facebook communities are constantly involved in debates around identity and the political, displaying in detail implicit and explicit language ideologies, as well as their extralinguistic correlates. Conveniently, content production on Facebook can be readily dated and localised, and its generators are (to a certain extent) traceable.

At the time of collecting the corpus, we focused on two modes of the Facebook interface: communities and pages. The latter ones are easily accessible portals that provide free and open information about companies, institutions, or groups with varying degrees of formalisation. On the other hand, communities (until 2018 called “groups”) are mainly aimed at interaction and contact between their members and can be either publicly reachable –i.e., of free access by anyone with a Facebook profile–, or restricted, which means that members require the permission of a moderator.