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Welcome to the new Books Network. I'm Caleb Zacharin and you're listening to the new Books Network. Today I'm speaking with Professor Lucia Fernandez-Amaya about her new book, A Linguistic Overview of WhatsApp Communication from Brill. Lucia's Professor in English at the Department of Philology and Translation at Pablo de Olivia University in Seville.
Lucia, thank you for joining me today on the New Books Network. Thank you. So first question before jumping into the topic of the book, and it's a topic that I think people interact with WhatsApp all the time, so I think that they would love to know a little bit more about their research behind it. But before getting into that, I'm just wondering, can you tell me a little bit about your background and how it is that you came to write this book?
Okay, sure. Well, as you have just mentioned, I'm a lecturer at Pablo de Olivia University in Seville, where I teach English as a social language for translation and interpreting a bachelor's students in the IOSU teaching to cultural competence in Masses Degree in international communication translation and interpreting, and in another Masses Degree in bilingual education. I hold the PhD in English and English for the University of Seville. In my research interests and publications focus on mathematics, which for this weekend, we would say is the language and context, and also linguistic correctness, the language of service encounters, and lately digital discourse.
So, well, why did I decide to study to begin writing about WhatsApp? Well, you know, WhatsApp is one of the most popular information, messaging tools. It was created by John Comme and Brian Action in 2009 in California, as an alternative to SMS, and was popular in Facebook in 2010. And according to Sattista, which is the company specializing in markets and consumer data, WhatsApp has 2 billion monthly active users outranking with chat and Facebook messenger.
And for the way that Facebook and YouTube, it is the third most popular social network worldwide. In my opinion, WhatsApp is a very good community option, especially for international or good messaging, because it enables users to share text, images, video, and both messages as well as voice and video calling. And also, WhatsApp group creation affordances have contributed to the app's popularity thanks to its user friendly support. It will be formed by an administrator who sends invitations to other contacts.
If all of the members have access to the group conversation, I may if they go whenever they like, but only the administrator has the possibility to add or remove other people. In these, WhatsApp groups can be created for different purposes, and can include friends, colleagues, or family members members. So when the pandemic began in March 2020, people had to look for alternative ways of communicating with each other in the distance. What's the use it was boosted by 40% or more.
In fact, it's using an increase in Spain, it's 76%. And this is beginning to be known as Generation Nute, due to the preference for instant messaging instead of traditional calls. For instance, the use of these tools almost doubles from calls in three, where 95% of Spaniards use that to communicate with each other. I tend to see that it's even higher on Spain's young population, and almost 97% of Spanish citizens between 14 and 24 years old use WhatsApp as their preferred means of communication with family and friends.
So it has us no surprise that WhatsApp support communication began rarely attracting the attention of researchers, and that was my case. So how did you principally examine these communications? What datasets did you look at and what approaches did you take to analyzing the information? Well, I began my research on WhatsApp communication in 2019.
At that time, WhatsApp having studied from sociological or political perspective in different communities of practice, for instance, parents or women, or lessons, universities, students, etc. And there were also other words that focused on WhatsApp use in various professional fields, for instance, health or business, computer studies, etc. Likewise, at the time, WhatsApp was also triggering academic research from an linguistic perspective. However, I realized that this part is growing body of literature that had investigated the use of WhatsApp.
There was a little research on conflict talk in this group of interactions, in a less-inspirational. So I decided to explore conflicts in the WhatsApp chat I have with my family. Then I took into consideration the participants' linguistic strategies as well as the use of multimedia elements and emotions. In that case, the analysis showed that most contributions were changed only, despite the availability of several emotions to emphasize things of algorithm.
So to my mind, a possible explanation could be that the conflict was so heated that the participants wanted to make your point of view very clear. And that's why their use of emotions was marginal, since you know that emotions are more open to different types of interpretation. And also, regarding the kind of language used, I found instances of unconventional spelling and punctuation led to repetition and obligations, which in a way were used by these family members to compensate the effects of the lack of verbal communication. Furthermore, conflict and so that conflict didn't progress in a linear way as in dialectic interactions, but in a narrative or a manner.
So there were several terms from various members who either were writing at the same time with site sequences that inserted a conflict within another. Consequently, I believe that that's very important to analyze conflict in these kind of digital group interactions from both a synchronic and ticronic perspective. After that, I covered out two more studies analyzing the expression of disagreement in WhatsApp and the data which we were taking once again from my family chat and from another chat I have with work colleagues. So when comparing these two, I found very significant dissimilarities.
Most notably, the higher presence of disagreement in the family WhatsApp role. And these higher tolerance for disagreements wasn't a way corroborated by the choice of the linguistic studies that they met. Whereas the family members tended to give emotional or personal reasons for disagreements as well as negative comments on the topic at hand, the colleagues referred to express their disagreement with mitigating expressions and talking agreement, the one would say, okay, yes, but, and then you disagree, right? So in order to have a solid background for this research, I have to read previous studies and I realized that there was no volume dedicated to the users WhatsApp from a linguistic perspective.
So I decided to contribute to digital discus analysis by providing a critical review of the state of the art of WhatsApp sites. So with this anti-aimind, I performed different searches in March 2021 in three well-known databases, MLA, LLEB, and SCAPUs that compiled linguistic sources. And I evaluated different types of documents and justified them into two main mathematical ways. On the one hand, those references that focus on WhatsApp linguistic traits, and on the other, work that is quite the user WhatsApp to learn English as a foreign or sacred language.
And based on this critical literature review, I could detect relevance of each of these. What was the most surprising thing that you discovered in your research? Well, I would say that the fundamental role played by multiple elements, such as photos, memes, or videos, and also a notice. So for instance, when analyzing conflict and disagreement, these multiple elements have different functions, such as already making the content themselves, showing disapproval without opinions or disdain emotion among many others.
I was also surprised by the number of studies having adopted a WhatsApp for this based approach to English as a foreign or sacred language, which have mushroomed over the last decade. So following the pre-test and then post-test design, these studies have focused on understanding whether this app improved specifically and was expelled. Some also have examined students' opinions on the use of WhatsApp to learn English, which were very positive. And the words provide substantial evidence that WhatsApp offers numerous benefits for English as a foreign or as a sacred language, teaching.
And not only does WhatsApp communication increase these students' motivation to learn, but it also enables them to improve various skills. So I agree with these researchers that WhatsApp could be a good instrument to compliment and update traditional instructions, which appears to be under the kind. Nevertheless, I have also recognized that the use of WhatsApp to learn English in class may present day to day difficulty as in the case of primary and secondary school students. For instance, here in Spain, some schools forbid the use of mobile phones, so it could be a problem.
Have you noticed any changes since you do it since doing this work? Have you noticed any ways that you use WhatsApp that have you had any changes in your usage? Well, not clearly. For instance, in the case of language, that's what I focus on, my research is focused on.
So I do this exactly the same non-standard configuration or spelling. I keep on submitting capital letters or reading accents in the case of Spanish or changing some letters in words to make it more oral, things like that. What I did was to become more conscious of the things that I was doing before. So I haven't changed in doing things, but I have become more conscious of the thing that I was doing.
How does WhatsApp use different cross-countries and languages? You've already talked a little bit about the potential for learning English via WhatsApp, but just more generally. Yeah, I'm afraid that cross-country studies are scarce. I feel that the possible explanation is that it's the fact that unlike other types of digital discourse, which are openly available, think of online videos on the other car, Airbnb or TripAppai store or chat on Twitter, Instagram or YouTube, doing a few collecting this kind of private language component is a challenge to itself.
So by what's not researchers use convenient data taken from a group of people who are easily rich, such as their list or contacts or their students as it was in a case. This is because only to ethical considerations is really hard to obtain representative copies of group interactions. The main problem is that all participants must give their consent. So it only takes the lack of consent of a single WhatsApp group member to evaluate the use of the chat information.
Another ethical issue to consider is the duration of this consent. You know that some WhatsApp groups can last forever. So in such cases, if the members give their consent for a given product, do researchers have the right to use the conversations forever too? Well, despite these difficulties, I believe that these contrastive studies are necessary to check whether any general WhatsApp media communication traits are independent of specific cultural constraints.
Well, there's evidence so far that suggests that the technologies coming out specific linguistic functions in the day may fulfill different purposes in different languages, or they may be interpreted in different ways by people with different cultural patterns. And the same with the Py2MIMs, for instance, who use on interpretation media fair, depending on the given culture, the messaging app, but also on whether they're sent to single addressing people or to mass audience. And moreover, it's been confirmed that variables, such as age and gender, affect the language use in WhatsApp. And it's also necessary therefore, to extend the number of studies that analyze these variables across different cultures.
For instance, to give you a personal example, during the conversation with a colleague, she told me that one of her British harassment students on a visit to Spain was literally shocked at having been included in so many WhatsApp groups without hidden her permission. So she was also overwhelmed by the frequency and quantity of the Spanish conversations in these groups, as she didn't have time to keep up to date with all the information. So as far as this student is concerned, this community behavior was very different from what she was used to in the UK, and she needed time to adjust to it. You've talked a little bit about some of the other research on WhatsApp, but I'm wondering, in addition to research on WhatsApp, if there's also other communication platforms that you considered, and that maybe helped you understand how communication WhatsApp occurs compared to, say, SMS or messenger, Facebook or other social media platforms.
Well, as I said before, I searched three different databases in some of these studies, compared WhatsApp with other platforms, as you mentioned, some of them compared to linguistic characteristics of WhatsApp communication with SMS or with language use on Facebook or Twitter. But after analyzing all these publications, in the case of my book, what I talked about, was about the linguistic characteristics of WhatsApp, you know, talking about its general linguistic traits or the information contained in the compiled practices, the use of multiple elements, the main language variations, etc. Some of the studies compare the language use in different platforms. Yeah.
Is there something that you discovered that was very unexpected for you to learn in the data? Well, as I mentioned before, I was surprised by the number of studies analyzing WhatsApp for English, foreign language or English as a second language. And I think that this is sold due to the pandemic, right? So, you know, that with a lockdown and everything, we have to look for new ways of teaching from the distance.
And I think that teachers found this in some of these, making it very, very useful for the students. And in fact, in this study, they also carry out several surveys and it seemed that students were also very happy with it. Yeah. What areas of future research do you think should be done on WhatsApp or even beyond WhatsApp just on social media sites in general?
Well, you know that in the case of WhatsApp, it is consciously updating its affordances and this is a major issue because its sex of available mode is named, give stickers are continuously growing and changing and such updates can affect early results, perhaps even to the extent of invalidating them, right? So therefore, it's important to constantly renew research on WhatsApp communication so as to keep the findings up to date. For instance, when I was writing a book, no studies on WhatsApp skips or stickers in English or or Spanish have been done. And in addition, I feel that WhatsApp oil files appear to be increasingly used and far too, you know, attention has been paid today.
Another niche that's worth investigating is the comparison of the community strategies used in specific face-to-face and WhatsApp speech events, such as the language used for instance, for service encounters or political campaigns, these have been largely explored in face-to-face communication but no research has been performed on the language used on WhatsApp for these purposes. So to my mind, the increase in the use of mobile phones generally and WhatsApp in particular justifies the relevance of this kind of future digital research. Since writing this book, is there anything that you feel that, you know, any interesting feedback that you've received, any perspective change that you might have had, something that you wrote about where you felt feel that maybe you've changed your opinion or maybe on the folks side of that, something that you wrote or said that you feel has been very validated since publication? Well, I would say that in fact, my initial ideas were corroborated, right?
So that with those studies, what I saw was that communication of WhatsApp kind of being analyzed in a linear way as in, you know, a face-to-face communication because they are there and the fact that you can write a message and the other person can see that message like two hours later and another conversation can be in the case of book interaction, another conversation can be given in the middle. So this is very, very interesting and the things that I thought before starting to work with this kind of digital language where in a way corroborated, it is quite difficult but very generalized, of course, and the bigger the book, the more difficult it is, but it's really, really interesting. And what are you working on now? Are you continuing looking at WhatsApp or are you looking at anything new?
Well, at this moment, I'm a co-hate research project funded by the European Regional Development Fund together with my colleague, Maggie and I will end up with it. In this project, it's entitled Digitalization of Human Interactions and its Social Impact. And it's members and researchers from different universities in Spain, the UK and the USA. And as part of this research project, we are preparing a special issue for the Journal of Language, Aggression and Conflict dealing with conflict in Spanish digital interactions.
Furthermore, at this moment, I'm carrying out three different studies analyzing different types of digital cases. None of them are related to WhatsApp at this moment. So to begin with, I've just finished a study with one of the members of this research group, Professor Gagnes, who I was listening to from the University of North Carolina at Chartot. And in this case, we have explored the social identity of current and applying polypnes and applied models and general notions of morality, moral emotions, and strategies of digital violence against women.
We have analyzed post-evaluating videos showing current-like behavior. And those videos have been posted through Instagrams, and Karen's gone crazy. In this case, the research showed that these websites constitute an other condemning emotional space, where behavior considered anti-normative in all public spaces is in turn uncivilated. Also, the dynamic between incidility against current and in-group stability emerges as something very important.
We also saw some connections between WhatsApp misogynistic ideologies and the emergence of Karen. This research is going to be part of a volume entitled The Disparsef Construction of Plays in Digital Age, which will be published by Rudledge next year. Moreover, at this moment, I'm also analyzing 100 Instagram profiles of Spanish women who decided to stop and get her card to income by then. So this apparently is insignificant individual choice, became a female empowering act, which shared on social media, trying to confront mainstream notions of beauty.
In this case, what I found is that user profiles help to construct an attractive online identity that reflects the way users perceive themselves and would like to be perceived by others. So in this respect, it seems that the idea that they are going great is that including a part of this group of women's online identity. And for the reason, I'm examining the discursive realizations of these Instagram profiles, focusing on content, linguistic strategies, and multimedia evidence. And preliminary results show that most of the profiles analyze contain a multimodal self-presentation space, a combination of text, hashtags, conventions, happenings, and modules.
And regarding content, defined and revealed existence of recurrent themes, conveying empowerment, sense of liberation, self confidence, all of them associated with the idea of transitioning to rain. In these research, also going to be part of a volume entitled Evaluating Identity's Online, case studies from Spanish Exvening World, which will be published by Pabra next year. And finally, and also conducting a research with a Greek colleague, Dimit Ramlanidó, who is working at Coventry University in the UK. And in this case, borrowing our conceptual tools from feminist pragmatics, language, aggression, and equal-length research.
And also inspired by insights from social media critics of these four studies. One video is to explore how Spanish-speaking and Greek-speaking Twitter users target two female politicians, positions, positions at opposite ends of the political spectrum. On the one hand, the Spanish left-wing MP Iremontero, and on the other hand, the Greek right-wing MP Nikita Lech. The preliminary results of our study reveal that despite the deep posts and social values and ideological positions reflected in the tweets examined, miso-genetic abuse, armed for in-sexist representations of women, emerged as a salient shared strategy involved, especially in Greek-speaking datasets.
And that's all I just want with that. It sounded like a lot of really interesting projects, all taking you all around the globe. But still, this is a similar theme of the internet uniting it. But yeah, this all sounds very fascinating.
Please reach out when those books come out. Thank you so much for being here. And learning a bit more about what's up. Of course.
Thank you.