America is relegated to a periphery. According to the same order, standard Spanish (and thus, Spanish imagined as correct) is symbolically located outside the limits of Chile.

However, a comparison of the number of adherents to the pages of RAE, ASALE, Fundéu and the Instituto Cervantes (administered from Spain) with those of Mapudungun language management groups on Facebook (administered from Chile) suggests that the transnational institutionality of the Spanish language reach a relatively moderate number of followers, especially considering their geopolitical size and economic resources. The community Kimeltuwe (‘place for teaching’), associated to the organisation with the greatest influence on Mapudungun language policies in recent years, counts with 190,000 followers on Facebook in August 2019 and 217,000 in June 2020. They emerged in the digital context through the production of educational images on Mapuche language vocabulary and grammar, while also discussing cultural and political issues. Kimeltuwe’s images are often in a meme format, they are eye-catching, didactic, and friendly to the general public, so they would spread quickly across social media. Because of its success, Kimeltuwe simultaneously acquired a regulatory role, becoming a key player in the 21st-century linguistic planning of Mapudungun. One of the community’s leaders, Víctor Carilaf, stated in the Chilean newspaper The Clinic (Milos, 2019): “We have become a benchmark: if they have questions, they ask us. And if Kimeltuwe says it is said like that, that’s the way it is”. By 2020 Kimeltuwe had effectively managed to establish linguistic legitimacy and positioned themselves as an active authority on corpus planning.

Now, it is important to keep in mind that these numbers do not necessarily correspond to a greater or lesser level of influence. Undoubtedly, the Kimeltuwe project has much less institutional power than Fundéu, although it has twice the number of followers on Facebook. Comparing both groups sheds light on how social media leads to the creation of new areas from which emerging institutions are projected. Their discourses on political demands, transformation or reaffirmation are successfully established in communities that until a few years ago were not susceptible to being articulated. Organisations with consolidated economic and political support and historical weight (such as Fundéu or the Instituto Cervantes) may obtain a relatively small number of followers on Facebook, not because of low levels of social penetration, but because they already occupy well-established political spaces. This sets them apart from emerging digital communities like Kimeltuwe, constructed virtually from scratch, and focused on political-linguistic projects which are more localised, but with much greater potential for expansion.

Considering the emergence of Mapuche language management groups, it is worth wondering whether similar spaces around the management of Chilean Spanish can be detected in the corpus (especially if focused on its national singularities), and what happens with political demands towards transformative language policies regarding gender, power, and sexuality.

There is no doubt that the development of groups seeking to question and rethink assumptions on sex and gender in the Spanish language in pursuit of social justice have achieved considerable relevance since 2010. The appearance in Spanish-speaking countries of numerous guides for the use of feminist and inclusive language (i.e., non-discriminatory by gender or sexual identity) is demonstrative of this trend (Lagneaux, 2017). Significantly, in the tracking phase of the present investigation, only digital spaces established from outside Chile and conceived in a transnational scale were found. A