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In:Current Theoretical and Applied Perspectives on Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics
Edited by Diego Pascual y Cabo and Idoia Elola
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 27] 2020
► pp. 7–38

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Chapter 1
Geographic variation of voseo on Spanish Twitter

 | The Ohio State University
 | The Ohio State University
Published online: 4 June 2020
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.27.01bla
Abstract
This study uses the social media platform Twitter to analyze geographic variation in the use of voseo throughout the Spanish-speaking world. It forms part of the first-ever voseo census (Morgan et al., 2017a, 2017b), which triangulates multiple sources to calculate the number of voseantes worldwide and to document their morphological and attitudinal preferences. We compiled a corpus of 32 million geocoded tweets, searched within it for ten linguistic variables – the pronoun vos and associated verbal morphology – and estimated usage rates by country. We found widespread voseo in the River Plate basin and Central America, but with important differences in rates of indicative, subjunctive, and imperative forms. We also address methodological questions in the use of big data for dialectological research.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background literature
    • 2.1Voseo verbal paradigms
    • 2.2Dialectology of voseo
      • 2.2.1Regional voseo
      • 2.2.2Stable national voseo
      • 2.2.3Unstable national voseo
      • 2.2.4Chilean voseo
    • 2.3The first-ever voseo census
    • 2.4Twitter dialectology in Spanish
  • 3.Research questions
  • 4.Methodology
    • 4.1Corpus source and processing
    • 4.2Linguistic variables
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1Pronouns
    • 5.2Present indicative of ser
    • 5.3Present indicative of pensar
    • 5.4Present indicative of poder
    • 5.5Present indicative of contar
    • 5.6Present indicative of volver
    • 5.7Present subjunctive of pensar
    • 5.8Present subjunctive of poder
    • 5.9Present subjunctive of volver
    • 5.10Imperative of contarme
  • 6.Discussion and conclusion
  • Notes
  • Corpus
  • References
  • Appendix
References (31)
Corpus
Internet Archive. (2011–2018). Twitter Stream Grab [corpus]. Retrieved from <[URL]>
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