Tuiteamos o pongamos un tuit? Investigating the Social Constraints of Loanword Integration in Spanish Social Media

TL;DR

This study explores how social context and speaker background influence the integration of English loanwords into Spanish social media language, revealing that social and formal factors significantly affect linguistic adaptation.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence on the social constraints affecting loanword integration in Spanish social media, highlighting the role of speaker background and audience in language adaptation.

Findings

Newspaper authors use more integrated loanwords than social media users.

Authors with wider audiences tend to use more integrated forms.

Social context and speaker background influence loanword and native word use.

Abstract

Speakers of non-English languages often adopt loanwords from English to express new or unusual concepts. While these loanwords may be borrowed unchanged, speakers may also integrate the words to fit the constraints of their native language, e.g. creating Spanish "tuitear" from English "tweet." Linguists have often considered the process of loanword integration to be more dependent on language-internal constraints, but sociolinguistic constraints such as speaker background remain only qualitatively understood. We investigate the role of social context and speaker background in Spanish speakers' use of integrated loanwords on social media. We find first that newspaper authors use the integrated forms of loanwords and native words more often than social media authors, showing that integration is associated with formal domains. In social media, we find that speaker background and expectations of formality explain loanword and native word integration, such that authors who use more Spanish and who write to a wider audience tend to use integrated verb forms more often. This study shows that loanword integration reflects not only language-internal constraints but also social expectations that vary by conversation and speaker.