Chats como factor de cambio lingüístico en la lengua francesa

Abstract

Internet has become a common tool nowadays. Everyday, millions of worldwide users log on to this mass-information medium. Its everyday use has caused linguistic phenomena to flourish and grow up at a previously unknown speed, examples being abbreviations, capitalizations, and omissions of question and exclamation marks at the beginning of a sentence, among others. Chats have created a virtual reality, which allows us to modify languages at any possible level. The objective of this paper is to approach the linguistic reality of French-speaking chats with the intention of proving their enormous power as a source of linguistic creativity. Therefore, we will select examples obtained from chats in French, and we will observe the mechanisms through which creativity is promoted, mainly focusing on phonological innovations. The final goal will be to prove whether this type of innovations are only produced in virtual language or if a parallel can be found in natural conversations