What is it about?
This journal article explores how Spanish speakers across 21 different countries talk about and evaluate the second person singular pronoun “voseo” (a way of addressing someone as "you") on social media, revealing how attitudes towards language use vary by region and are shaped by long-standing social stigma towards particular groups of speakers.
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Why is it important?
This study is the first language attitude study of voseo to use large-scale social media data, allowing direct comparison of how speakers from many countries evaluate the same pronoun in a shared online space. By drawing comments together from across distinctive regions, the study shows how a grammatical address form (second person singular pronoun, i.e., "you") can take on vastly different social meanings—ranging from an expression of regional pride (e.g., Argentina) to stigma (e.g., Chile)—depending on the commenter's place identity. This approach reveals patterns of language attitude judgments that are difficult to capture through surveys or interviews alone and highlights how social media has become a key site where language norms are both produced and contested.
Perspectives
All language is arbitrary, meaning linguistic features do not carry inherent social meaning. Yet speakers routinely assign social meanings to particular ways of speaking, shaping how those forms are perceived and judged when spoken by particular speakers. A pronoun like voseo has no inherent meaning, but is often treated as a marker of regional origin, low education, indigenous identity, or even criminality. What struck me most in this study was how rarely criticism of voseo was truly about the pronoun itself. Instead, language becomes a socially acceptable way to draw boundaries and exclude certain groups. I hope this work encourages readers to question why some ways of speaking are judged so harshly, and to recognize how deeply social identity and inequality are embedded in everyday language judgments.
Abby Killam
Georgetown University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Digital metacommunication, Spanish in Context, December 2025, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/sic.24013.kil.
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