Torres, Marta

Causes of linguistic interferences in Spanish and Catalan IRC sessions

Abstract

The aim of this proposal is the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the interference in:

a) Spanish within Catalan IRC chat
b) Catalan within Spanish IRC chat

in IRC sessions with participants who live in Catalonia, a country with its own language (Catalan) and an official one (Spanish).

We also take in account the influence of English terminology and expressions in both languages due to the predominance of English in Internet environment.

We assume the hypothesis that code-mixing has pragmatic motivation:for instance, the use of the Spanish hombre! 'man' as interjections of surprise in Catalan IRC chat -this interjection does not exist in Catalan with this function- helps to increase the expressivity in CMC media.