Tendencias de hablantes vascos en conversaciones en Instagram : el cambio de código y sus funciones

The objective of this article is to study the forms of language, the type of discourse and the resources used by young Basque speakers in their conversations on the social network Instagram. Specifically, we want to analyze Code Switching and see what function this linguistic phenomenon fulfills. The studied corpus comes from 30 students aged 18-25, proportionally distributed by gender; the production of one of them is chosen for two years. The analysis of this focus group shows that the functions that predominate in CS are connotative; in general to give expressiveness, humour and also a youthful touch. Likewise, the CS which means group solidarity is high. As for the referential functions, it serves to greet, to give encourage or to congratulate. Additionally, young people use a variety of strategies for building relationship on Instagram, including lexical, morphological, and phonological procedures. In summary, a tendency is detected to mark authenticity and identity through the use of local dialect variants as well as to use other languages ​​that give them a touch of modernity. In short, we see a connection with local roots and at the same time a willingness to open to modernity, a “glocal” vision and use of the language.