Revue Romane. Langue et littérature. International Journal of Romance Languages and Literatures - Online First

This article explores a new data source and a new method to analyze the spatial distribution of a well-known case of linguistic variation in Spanish, namely the use of personal pronouns in informal address also known as voseo and tuteo. The data source is the social media X, previously Twitter, and more precisely the geolocated textmessages, that is, messages associated with a precise location information. Previous analyses of the spatial distribution of voseo and tuteo in the literature focus more on the distribution of standard agreement forms of voseo/tuteo on the country scale and less on the city scale and they are mostly based on qualitative or on quantitative research with a small dataset. The present study focusses on the distribution of voseo and tuteo on a city scale on a bigger dataset than the dataset used in previous studies and it also takes mixed agreement cases into account such as tú podés instead of standard agreement tú puedes. The spatial distribution of voseo and tuteo on a city scale in the present use of voseo and tuteo in Argentina shows traces of historical origin of voseo and tuteo distribution in this country and some mixing cases more often occur in big cities, which might indicate that these mixing cases are socially higher marked.