k dixez? A corpus study of Spanish Internet orthography

New technologies have always influenced communication, by adding new ways of communication to the existing ones and/or changing the ways in which existing 10 forms of communication are utilized. This is particularly obvious in the way in which computer-mediated communication (CMC) has had an impact on com- munication. In this exploratory article, we are concerned with some character- istics of a newly evolving form of Spanish Internet orthography that differ from standard Spanish spelling. Three types of deviations from 'the norm' are consid- 15 ered: a reduction (post-vocalic d/() deletion in -ado), a transformation (namely the spelling change from ch to x), and reduplication (of characters). Based on a corpus of approximately 2.7 million words of regionally balanced informal inter- net Spanish compiled in 2008, we describe the spelling changes and discuss a variety of sometimes interacting factors governing the rates of spelling variants 20 such as overall frequency effects, functional (pragmatic, sociolinguistic, and iconicity-related) characteristics, and phonological constraints. We also compare our findings to data from Mark Davies's (2002) Corpus del Espanol (100 million words, 1200s-1900s), http://www.corpusdelespanol.org) as well as other sources and relate them to the discussion of the register/genre of Internet language.