doxa.comunicación | nº 31, pp. 265-281 | 273
julio-diciembre de 2020
Gabriel Eduardo Alvarado Pavez
ISSN: 1696-019X / e-ISSN: 2386-3978
Subsequently, the author of this posting incorporates in the comments section a brief chart of words in Spanish, Latin, English, Italian and French (i.e., piper, pepper, pepe, poivre) to which he attaches a bibliographic reference. This is informative of a remarkably novel representation of the Chilean language, one that situates it in a line of historical continuity with Latin, while excluding the Hispanic and indigenous elements as pertinent to its configuration. This constitutes a narrative whose main argument, based on comparative linguistics, is aimed to deconstruct the underlying assumptions of what is the exact meaning of “speaking poorly”. The narrative suggests that the Chilean language, even in its most banal and unpredictable aspects (such as the name of a spicy dip) participates in a historical-cultural continuum with prestigious international languages and that all of them are subject to related mechanisms of temporal transformation. Therefore, it is suggested that Chilean Spanish and English or French do not differ in their most intimate texture and that the divergent attributes given to these languages are undoubtedly due to extralinguistic factors. Finally, by inserting the comment that “bitch, we Chileans speak Latin poorly ...”, the author is making an ironic statement about the ideology of incorrectness often applied to the Chilean Spanish, as soon as he questions the very foundations that constitute it. When a language is thought no longer as a fixed, stable entity with defined limits, but as a concurrence of disparate linguistic facts in constant change, ingrained notions of norm and correctness are necessarily put into question. Note that he also adds the expletive “puta” (‘bitch’ or ‘whore’), commonplace in Chilean Spanish colloquial use and equivalent to other expressive voices referring to sexual taboo (coño, mierda, fuck). In consequence, the contrast between the questioning of historical notions of linguistic correctness and the interjective use of a vulgar word ends up magnifying the echoes of irony.
Now, Hablai chileno? has had relatively limited success. In August 2019, its “likes” barely exceeded 3,500. The number of posts it presents is quite small and they are also infrequent. Their comment sections are succinct. This entails that Hablai chileno? ultimately lacks resonance on Facebook and in the broader public sphere. The alleged “resources to learn to speak Chilean” announced in its description are also not available in its contents. There are registers of an enthusiastic promotion of chilenismos; an active defence of the use of Chilean voseo; and the proposal of orthographic regulations. None of these contents shows, however, a clear didactic intention.
This is consistent with the main conclusion after the tracking process in the digital corpus: that beyond the group Hablai chileno?, in the present analysis there were no findings of relevant groups that were dedicated to Spanish language issues in Chile or that incorporated national Spanish as a central element of their interests. This void is a sign of the high degree of depoliticisation of the Spanish language in the public consciousness, which contrasts particularly with the high degree of political vitality of Mapudungun.
Thus, the ideologeme that in Chile people speak poorly, at least as evidenced on Facebook, does not urge the population to adjust their language to the standard norm, nor does it force them to seek the autonomy or the formality of their linguistic difference. Does this imply that the Chilean population does not talk about their language and identity issues into the social network? What about the representations of anonymity, authenticity, and pride described by the theory elsewhere? In which Facebook spaces would it be possible to find this type of language ideologies?
It was, therefore, crucial to rethink how to obtain data by tracking and selecting corpus on Facebook, to find spaces where language ideologies were relevant and to intuitively resort to interstices of the social network where language