Discrimination and limitations in the use of the Spanish language: the fetish of norms on Twitter (X)

Abstract

This paper discusses the restrictions that the standard norm of Spanish imposes on speakers. The analysis has been based on opinions expressed on the social network Twitter regarding memes that present spelling or grammatical deviations from the standard norm of Spanish. Firstly, some terms are discussed to contextualize this phenomenon, such as linguistic profiling and linguistic discrimination (linguicism, accentism, and glottophobia). After that, a corpus of one hundred comments collected from Twitter between November and December 2022 is analyzed. This corpus serves as textuality to illustrate how society reproduces discriminatory patterns based on the assumption of regulations understood in terms of command and prestige. The main conclusion of this research is that the restrictive nature of the languages governed by normative institutions limits the innovative practices of a linguistic community and encourages discriminatory and classist practices.