Lenguas minoritarias y redes sociales: la creación de #estiktokat para contenidos en catalán

Milà-Garcia, Alba; Tudela-Isanta, Anna

doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.18543/ced.2476

Lenguas minoritarias y redes sociales: la creación de #estiktokat para contenidos en catalán

Citation

Milà-Garcia A, Tudela-Isanta A. Lenguas minoritarias y redes sociales: la creación de #estiktokat para contenidos en catalán. Cuadernos europeos de Deusto. 2022;Núm. Especial 04:173-202. DOI: 10.18543/ced.2476

Abstract

The use of minority languages in the digital sphere has become a clear indicator of their linguistic vitality, and one of the contexts where it becomes more apparent is in the way in which young people use these languages in social media. Therefore, this is an essential area to focus on when it comes to debating language diversity in Europe, the importance of which is currently unquestionable. This paper focuses on the study of the hashtag #estiktokat, which has more than 510 million views on the platform and has become a reference when it comes to finding and creating content in Catalan. This hashtag was born from the initiative of a group of young content creators who designed it to share videos in Catalan and to create a community around it. The analysis combines qualitative and quantitative approaches. On the one hand, we carried out semi structured interviews with four creators of the hashtag in order to reconstruct how it was developed. On the other, we compiled and analysed a corpus of the 216 videos with more engagement recovered in TikTok by the #estiktokat hashtag. The results show that the presence of content in Catalan has become normalised on TikTok, with a wide range of topics and active creators, which proves that the hashtag has managed to create a space of communication and interaction in Catalan.