Piular or tuitejar? a study of social media loanwords in catalan

Abstract

Globalisation has allowed increased contact between societies and cultures. The evolution of societies and the creation of new technologies make coining new terms an inevitable task for language users. This study aims to investigate the processes of integrating foreign words, especially verbs, into the Catalan language in a social media setting, with an informal register. We create a list of words to study and collect data from Twitter/X. We disambiguate the contexts in which the words relate to social media by prompting large language models, with 0.9 accuracy. Our findings show that using native words is more common than adapting foreign roots. This behaviour is not shared with other findings in the context of newspapers and magazine texts, and we hypothesise that the register may be the reason. We also find both inflection and light verb constructions used to create new verbal forms.