couple of examples are Facebook communities like Campaña para la incorporación del lenguaje inclusivo (‘Campaign for the incorporation of inclusive language’) with nearly 16,000 “likes” in October 2019, and the group Lenguaje inclusivo (‘Inclusive language’) with 2,500. Both initiatives started in Argentina and, despite that they have an evident resonance in some circuits in Chile, they do not have local equivalents. This absence is informative that, in parallel with other issues considered global in the management of Spanish, the discussion and administration of the political space where language, identity, gender and sexuality intersect tend to occur in a scalar configuration where Chile remains on the periphery.

On the other hand, a political redefinition of Chilean Spanish within a nationalist discourse was not found among Facebook pages and groups. The analysis carried out here did not detect groups specifically dedicated to exacerbating the link between language and national identity in Chile. This contrasts with some groups aimed at the revitalisation of the Mapuche language (such as Kimeltuwe) where there is a clear desire to create a symbolic link between language, culture and identity, frequently to emphasise or celebrate the national character of the Mapuche community.

However, this research found a few groups focused on the celebration of chilenismos (i.e., vocabulary considered as mostly or exclusively Chilean) or of the Chilean dialect of Spanish, often in a humorous or festive tone. After the August 2018 searches, only two communities and pages were documented: No hablo español, hablo chileno (‘I don’t speak Spanish, I speak Chilean’), with 980 followers in June 2020, and Chilenismos, with 3,600, also in June 2020. Although one can infer that, at some point, Facebook participants had the intention of including language and identity issues, it is obvious that their final purpose was to produce comedy content without mentioning such topics. Later, these communities and pages have not acquired notoriety, which probably suggests an absence of spaces specifically dedicated to the articulation of affirmative discourses of Chilean Spanish within Facebook.

There is, however, one notable exception. A community called Hablai chileno? (‘Do you speak Chilean?’ with a characteristically Chilean verbal conjugation), shows a number of innovations aimed at reimagining and even subverting the trope that in “In Chile people speak poorly”. According to its description (checked in August 2019), the group is dedicated to the “grammatical analysis of Chilean speech” and to the production of “linguistic resources aimed to learn to speak Chilean”. A critical reading reveals that Hablai chileno? congregates well-informed people interested in linguistic issues with the intention to refute negative ideas about the Spanish variety spoken in Chile. Strictly speaking, this community does not focus on grammatical analysis, nor on promoting the use of Chilean Spanish, but on questioning the assumptions that minimise its sociocultural value.

There is an example of this (dated on 18th November 2018) when a participant of the group published the image of a receptacle full of pebre (a raw dip consisting of chopped tomato, onion, coriander, and hot sauce) next to a red pepper. Chileans imagine pebre as a product typically representative of the national way of life, despite its affinity to the chimichurri from Argentina and Uruguay, the Bolivian llajwa, or the Mexican pico de gallo. The image is accompanied by a text that reads: “¿Cachabay que la palabra piper en latín se convirtió en pebre en chileno y pepper en inglés?” (‘Did you know that the word piper in Latin became pebre in Chilean and pepper in English?’, with Chilean verbal conjugation). The text ends with the statement, “puta que hablamos mal el latín los chilenos”, (‘bitch, we Chileans speak Latin so poorly’) in addition to a mischievous, tongue-out emoji (😝).