#dudaRAE: a merging analysis of folk prescriptivism and dialectology

Abstract

Spanish is currently conceived as a pluricentric language—a shared pan-Hispanic norm speaks to and about all Spanish speakers worldwide. But prescribing the language is not restricted to institutions, people are watchful of their language themselves. A turning point came when the RAE (Spanish Royal Academy) joined Twitter and began to exchange normative views with the laypeople, enabling their fair share of online folk prescriptivism. This work takes some of the most frequent questions sent to the RAE and analyses #dudaRAE tweets and retweets to reveal their regional provenance and determine which countries are more interested in specific linguistic uses. These figures are compared against dialectological maps built from Twitter data, aiming to establish a relationship between people’s engagement and local use. Results show some enlightening regional variations and that the higher use of minority variants is occasionally associated with people’s curiosity. Questions arise about the underlying, culturally diverse stances towards the institution.