Living in a Multilingual World (The One ABout Twitter and the Spanish Language)

Going through my Twitter feed the other day, it struck me how strange my mother tongue, Spanish, has become. There were words and phrases in my co-Twitterers’ pages that I could not recognise. Sometimes, it was only after the third or fourth attempt that I was able to decipher what had been written.

Because English is so dynamic, fluid and adaptable I no longer bat an eyelid when I see a LOL or ROTF. I expect that. After all, social networking sites’ roots are mainly Anglophone. But that such an austere language like Spanish dares to use a verb like “Twitear” (literally, “to tweet), is taking the biscuit.

Yo twiteo, nosotros twiteamos...

And that’s where the challenges lie. You could say that the Anglicisation of Spanish was foreseeable. An irony, really, as in the real world Spanish is overtaking English in the US and could be the official language of the largest English-speaking country on Earth in a generation from now. But online, English still holds the triumphant card. In our cyber-world we speak Spanglish. The second challenge is that social media’s spontaneity invites grammatical sloppiness and typos. Lots of them, in fact.

Because of the Spanish language’s structure – long, three or four-line paragraphs can easily be made up of one single sentence with many subordinate ones – Twitter would be the last place where you would find fluent and articulate Spanish speakers. Which logically poses a hurdle to us. And where there is a hurdle, there exists the desire to overcome it. That’s how we come up with aberrations like “ke” (“que”, “what” or “that”).

Is there a way back from this situation? There has certainly been a backlash. Unfortunately it has been led by academics and language specialists for whom even my Cuban accent would be an anomaly. That, to me, is taking it too far. I would dare to ask Twitter to increase its word limit, just for the sake of Hispanics. But having read recently that he media giant is planning to float in the New York Stock Exchange in November, I thought that maybe Jack Dorsey would be too occupied to answer my phone calls. Or my tweets.

The linguistic fate of the Spanish language on most social media, especially Twitter, is one of those topics that becomes like the annoying fly that drives you mad at dinnertime. Very rarely you will be able to swat it and when you least expect it, it will alight on your food. “Twiteando” to the whole world.

© 2013

Next Post: “Sunday Mornings: Coffee, Reflections and Music”, to be published on Sunday 27^th October at 10am (GMT)