Si O No, Que Penses? Catalonian Independence and Linguistic Identity on Social Media

Ian Stewart, Yuval Pinter, Jacob Eisenstein


Abstract
Political identity is often manifested in language variation, but the relationship between the two is still relatively unexplored from a quantitative perspective. This study examines the use of Catalan, a language local to the semi-autonomous region of Catalonia in Spain, on Twitter in discourse related to the 2017 independence referendum. We corroborate prior findings that pro-independence tweets are more likely to include the local language than anti-independence tweets. We also find that Catalan is used more often in referendum-related discourse than in other contexts, contrary to prior findings on language variation. This suggests a strong role for the Catalan language in the expression of Catalonian political identity.
Anthology ID:
N18-2022
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 2 (Short Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2018
Address:
New Orleans, Louisiana
Editors:
Marilyn Walker, Heng Ji, Amanda Stent
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
136–141
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N18-2022
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N18-2022
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ian Stewart, Yuval Pinter, and Jacob Eisenstein. 2018. Si O No, Que Penses? Catalonian Independence and Linguistic Identity on Social Media. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 2 (Short Papers), pages 136–141, New Orleans, Louisiana. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Si O No, Que Penses? Catalonian Independence and Linguistic Identity on Social Media (Stewart et al., NAACL 2018)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/N18-2022.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/N18-2022.mp4