Examining Twitter as a source for address research using Colombian Spanish

The present study aims to describe pronominal address use in Colombian varieties of Spanish in a specific context of computer-mediated communication, namely Twitter. This description will serve as a discussion of Twitter as an exciting new source of linguistic data for address research. A large corpus of tweets was compiled, including memes, reported speech, and conversations. Twitter data on the geographical preference for pronoun use were in line with patterns observed using traditional data: Cali and Medellin used vos significantly more frequently than did the Colombian capital of Bogota, which in turn used usted significantly more frequently. However, in contrast to traditional data, tu was shown to be used most frequently overall in the corpus due to the medium’s informal nature. Along with its abundance and geographical information, a strength of Twitter data is the possibility of isolating the effect of emotional and social characteristics on pronoun choice in a naturalistic setting. The expression of strong emotions significantly correlate with the use of the pronoun tu in the corpus.