Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict - Volume 13, Issue 1, 2025

This paper explores the construction of Latino identity in Spain. The term Hispanic (Latino later became the label of choice) was added to the US census in the 1970s, initially as an ethnic category, but it has undergone a process of racialization, making Latinos a distinct racial group in the US. The concept of Latinidad has been extensively studied in the US context. This paper adopts a netnographic approach to examine how Latinidad is constructed in Spain. To conduct this qualitative research, NVivo was used to analyze a reference corpus of over 5,000 online comments triggered by a video discussing the situation of Latinos in Spain that had been posted on YouTube by El País. The study employs a multidisciplinary approach, drawing from fields like identity, impoliteness, and raciolinguistics. It particularly focuses on perceptions of visible minorities and attitudes towards language varieties different from European Spanish.

The relationship between service providers and guests has changed due to online platforms like Airbnb, which allow for a more direct contact between them. Although most responses to guests’ reviews tend to be positive and even include relational work strategies (Bridges and Vásquez 2018; Hernández-López 2019), verbal aggression is also performed (Hopkinson 2018). This study aims to focus on explicit and implicit aggressive responses to negative reviews on Airbnb in English and Spanish, with special attention to corrective facework strategies to repair the hosts’ face loss (Guerrero et al. 2014; Maíz-Arévalo 2019). Thus, 200 responses to negative reviews were gathered and analysed qualitatively, considering the strategies intended to mitigate potential face threat and to revert the situation. It was found that most of the hosts’ responses in the Spanish dataset aimed at repairing their own face within the community, while their English counterparts acknowledged negative reviews and apologised more often.

Online reviews have partly become a complaints channel in which posters vent their negative feelings (Henning-Thurau et al. 2004), but the contents, as well as the way posters express their opinions, may vary depending on the type of review, the platform, and the consumers’ expectations, among others. This study explores 600 negative reviews in Spanish, posted to the outsourced review site Trustpilot about three different companies: Zara, Airbnb, and Travelgenio. The aim of this study is to examine: (1) the themes that posters raise as the source of complaint or conflict; and (2) the impoliteness formulae (Culpeper 2016) found in the three datasets. The results show that reviews are structured around a limited set of themes and formulae, which range from rather descriptive evaluations that report moderate dissatisfaction (Zara reviews) to highly aggressive reviews related to communication problems and significant loss of money and time (Travelgenio).

During the COVID-19 vaccination campaign, the Spanish Ministry of Health shared informative posts on platforms like Facebook, sparking heated debates. This paper utilizes a custom corpus of Facebook comments with evidential elements to explore the disagreement and confrontation in online comments from pro- and anti-vaccine advocates. The study also analyses the types of evidence employed by posters to support their positions, revealing potential hierarchies of information sources in terms of reliability and validity.

Findings indicate that anti-vaccine advocates (i) engage in stronger disagreement than vaccine supporters; (ii) use disqualification and hostile speech acts slightly more; and (iii) employ more impolite strategies. Moreover, the study shows differences between these two user groups with regard to the sources of the information they chose to use: anti-vaccine posters employ a higher percentage of more objective types of evidence, while pro-vaccine posters resort to evidence based on more subjective, and personal sources.

This paper reports on an examination of the actions that Spanish epistemic agents perform in order to question, challenge, undermine and/or destroy the epistemic personhood of an informer on Twitter, recently been renamed ‘X’. Relying on a corpus of reactions to information about sanitary measures released during the COVID-19 pandemic by an allegedly reliable and trustworthy information source, namely the Spanish Ministry of Health, the analysis looks into the said actions and how these are arranged in larger digital discourse sequences. While contributing to extant research on conflict talk in Spanish on social networks, the paper also aims to raise vulnerable epistemic agents’ awareness of the varied forms and dynamics of threats to epistemic personhood as a way of empowering them to identify and counteract such threats.