"Ándate al páramo": prácticas lingüísticas de exclusión y prejuicios en contra de los indígenas en la interacción interétnica en Twitter (Ecuador)

Placencia, Maria Elena (2022) "Ándate al páramo": prácticas lingüísticas de exclusión y prejuicios en contra de los indígenas en la interacción interétnica en Twitter (Ecuador). Oralia: Analisis del Discurso Oral 25 (2), pp. 125-153. ISSN 1575-1430.

Abstract

This article examines the linguistic practices of Twitter users through which they discriminate and exclude indigenous people in the Ecuadorian context, and the prejudices behind these practices. For the study, the accounts of three indigenous leaders, active on Twitter, were selected and a corpus was constructed based on the responses provided by users to leaders’ tweets (i.e., 2944 responses); this was within a selected period during the 2021 presidential elections. The approach adopted is that of critical pragmatics in seeking to unveil discriminatory practices against minorities, taking into account in this case the historical and political context of their occurrence. Drawing on works on slurs (e.g., Croom 2011) and racial insults (e.g., Guimarães 2003), 329 instances of these types of insults were identified in the corpus examined; they were then grouped thematically, according to the negative beliefs about indigenous identity that they seem to (re)create (e.g., that indigenous people are ignorant, that they lack hygiene, etc.). The study shows that the racism that has been observed in face-to-face interactions (see e.g., De la Torre 2002; Placencia 2008) persists and has spread online (not surprisingly) –with multiple realizations, both conventional and nonconventional–, and it seems to go unchecked on the Twitter platform.

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