Minority Languages and Social Media: The Creation of #estiktokat for Content in Catalan

  • Alba Milà-Garcia Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain
  • Anna Tudela-Isanta The Open University, United Kindom
DOI: https://doi.org/10.18543/ced.2476
Keywords: Catalan, minority languages, social media, TikTok, hashtags

Abstract

The use of minority languages in the digital sphere has become a clear indicator of their linguistic vitality, and one of the contexts where it becomes more apparent is in the way in which young people use these languages in social media. Therefore, this is an essential area to focus on when it comes to debating language diversity in Europe, the importance of which is currently unquestionable. This paper focuses on the study of the hashtag #estiktokat, which has more than 510 million views on the platform and has become a reference when it comes to finding and creating content in Catalan. This hashtag was born from the initiative of a group of young content creators who designed it to share videos in Catalan and to create a community around it. The analysis combines qualitative and quantitative approaches. On the one hand, we carried out semi structured interviews with four creators of the hashtag in order to reconstruct how it was developed. On the other, we compiled and analysed a corpus of the 216 videos with more engagement recovered in TikTok by the #estiktokat hashtag. The results show that the presence of content in Catalan has become normalised on TikTok, with a wide range of topics and active creators, which proves that the hashtag has managed to create a space of communication and interaction in Catalan.

Received: 31 March 2022
Accepted: 06 May 2022

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Author Biographies

Alba Milà-Garcia, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain

Adjunct lecturer at the Department of Translation and Language Sciences at Universitat Pompeu Fabra and at the Department of Catalan Philology and General Linguistics at Universitat de Barcelona. She holds a PhD in Translation and Language Sciences (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 2017) and a master’s in Training of Teachers of Spanish as a Foreign Language (Universitat de Barcelona-Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 2011). Her main research interest is pragmatics, more specifically politeness and facework/relational work, both in spoken and written contexts, and within the latter with a special interest in digital discourse. As secondary research interests she has focused on neology and vocabulary and on foreign / additional language teaching, thanks to her participation in funded research projects. These interests have been consolidated in both national and international publications.

Anna Tudela-Isanta, The Open University, United Kindom

Lecturer in the School of Languages and Applied Linguistics at the Open University and an adjunct lecturer in Art and Humanities Studies at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. She holds a PhD in Linguistic Communication and Multilingual Mediation from Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Her research interests include sociolinguistics, multilingualism, and Catalan and Spanish as foreign languages. She is a member of the multidisciplinary research center MIRCo (Multilingualism, Speech and Communication), EDiSo (Association of Studies on Speech and Society) and SERCLE (Societat d’Ensenyament i Recerca del Català com a Llengua Estrangera). She has participated in national and international publications and conferences.

Published
2022-07-22
How to Cite
Milà-Garcia, Alba, and Anna Tudela-Isanta. 2022. “Minority Languages and Social Media: The Creation of #estiktokat for Content in Catalan”. Deusto Journal of European Studies, no. 04 (July), 173-202. https://doi.org/10.18543/ced.2476.
Issue
No. 04 (2022): SPECIAL ISSUE. Linguas minoritarias e futuro de Europa. Minority Languages and the Future of Europe
Section
Articles

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