Thursday 24 October 2013

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 27th October at 10am (GMT)

13 comments:

  1. Twitter might break if the limit was increased haha

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  2. Twitter butchers English too. It's fascinating how the publishing world has embraced it, given the grammatical issues. I hadn't realized that it was even worse in Spanish. Do you tweet in both English and Spanish? What is your handle? Mine is @SarahWLaurence.

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  3. I haven't started tweeting yet... I do find it funny how some "English-teacher types" bemoan how texting is ruining the language. When I was a kid and was an amateur radio operator, using morse code, we used all the short cuts that are now so common on tweeting. There were even a long list of Q-signs that allowed you to community in code with people of another language-including Spanish.

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  4. Shakespeare would have LOVED Twitter! He invented so many words and phrases in the English language and made it quite wonderful.

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  5. Imagine if Chaucer had access to Twitter...perhaps we'd be speaking a totally different language by now! lol:D

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  6. I cringe to think of what it will be like for teachers grading essays and term papers and reports in the future! :)

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  7. Twitter is something I've never gotten in to at all. As far as Spanish becoming the official language of the US, NEVER! Tho there might be more folks speaking Spanish than English here in a few generations English will always be the official language.

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  8. I follow Italian television, and can't miss all the Anglicized words I hear, words that were I not speaking English but say, Russian, I would not understand at all. The world has adopted so many phrases and words from the English language, and social interactions are so much easier because of this, that I can't complain at all. My grandchild, who speaks no Italian, will visit Italy next summer and will meet her Italian uncles and aunts, cousins and lost relatives who will know enough English phrases to make her feel part of the family. A blessing in disguise.

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  9. Twiteando! That's priceless!

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  10. Interesting article, I guess Twitter must be changing all languages, just as the global dominance of English changes all languages.

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  11. This is so interesting. Thanks. As one of your commenters said-- Twitter butchers English too and I, for one, hate all the abbreviations--on texting also--but it must be so strange, as you point out, when moving in a multi-lingual world. Crazy. Thanks for highlighting this point--and your always interesting perspective. k.

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  12. Butchered is a good word, Sarah. I try hard to tweet proper English, when I can, but 140 characters makes it difficult in any language. We are returning to the cave paintings of our ancestors.

    Btw (there you go) I am borrowing your Dylan quote for a tweet.

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