Sociolinguistic variation of chilean verbal voseo in Facebook biography interactions

Abstract

This article presents the analysis of the use of Chilean verbal voseo in the Facebook Biography taking into account two sociolinguistic variables: age and sex. Specifically, a corpus composed of messages written in the Facebook Biography of 90 subjects, from the province of Iquique (Chile), was analyzed in a period of 30 days. The results show that the use of Chilean verbal voseo in this medium correlates with the age variable, the youngest groups using verbal voseo most in their interventions. Regarding the gender variable, our analyses do not show significant differences between the groups of men and women.