The use of Catalan in the X accounts of Diari de Balears and the public radio and TV stations of the Balearic Islands: An analysis of frequency of use and linguistic correctness

Abstract

Studying the use of the Catalan language on the social media has been a focus of interest among philologists, sociologists and communicators for over a decade, since a language’s use in the digital sphere can be interpreted as an indicator of its health. This study is a qualitative, exploratory analysis of the way two profiles of the Balearic Islands media, IB3 and Diari de Balears adapt their language uses to the Balearic Islands’ local forms on the X platform. It also examines how often they post in Catalan, the degree of correctness of those posts and whether the posts go viral. The results allow for some optimism, given the presence of the Balearic dialectal variety in the digital world, because the two media posted all the messages analysed in Catalan, primarily IB3, which mainly uses the Balearic Islands lexicon and whose posts are linguistically correct. However, neither of the media’s posts go viral very often.