The construction of the linguistic identity of Santiago Abascal on Twitter

Abstract

Political campaign speeches that have traditionally been analyzed focused on rallies or programs. However, already entered the 21st century, social networks have begun to be part of that political discourse. In this paper, the Twitter account of Santiago Abascal, leader of the far-right Spanish political party VOX, is analyzed in order to describe his use of co-official languages ​​from a sociolinguistic point of view. Our hypothesis is that there is an avoidance of its use to align itself with Spanish nationalist positions that promotes monolingualism as part of its concept of Spanishness. For this, an ad hoc corpus of all his publications in 2019 has been prepared. Data collection was automatic and manual. The conclusion is that Santiago Abascal avoids the use of co-official languages ​​and that even he Spanishizes terms such as Generalidad to stand out and differentiate itself as more Spanish than the other parties and candidates