A comparative analysis of first-person singular subject pronoun expression in Facebook and sociolinguistic interviews: Studying variation via social media

Resumen

This study explores Facebook posts and compares them to oral data from sociolinguistic interviews to investigate variation in social media. The participants in the Facebook group were verified through acquaintances to be born and raised in Hermosillo, making for an accurate comparison, leaving differences to be due to data source and not dialectal variation. The variable used for the comparison is first-person subject pronoun expression. The results show differences in terms of overall frequency (16.7 % expressed pronouns in the interview data and 10.2 % in the Facebook data), as well as the variables that condition subject pronoun expression in Hermosillo Spanish. These analysis findings further our understanding of variation in social media and variation in written Spanish.