El viajero multilingüe: préstamos y alternancia de código en foros, blog y opiniones de viajeros en internet

This paper investigates the use of loanwords and code-switches in peer-to-peer tourist communication, focusing on the way these uses define the personal image of the writers/travellers, setting them apart from the general community of Spanish speakers and identifying them with a restricted, prestigious discourse community. The distribution of loanwords and code-switches is compared across a corpus representative of traditional tourist communication and a corpus of peer-to-peer tourist communication. Using four criteria already attested in literature (listedness, phonomorphological integration, spelling consistency, and flagging), four categories of uses are identified: mimetic loanwords, unstable loanwords, unlisted cultural loanwords and code-switches. Their distribution is then associated with the linguistic competence of the discourse community within which each use is shared. Results associate peer-to-peer tourist communication to a higher incidence of unstable and unlisted cultural loanwords, with a visible preference for foreignising forms. These serve to emphasise the writer’s (partially) multilingual and intercultural competences giving way to a prestigious individual code. Code-switches, on the other hand, are indicative of a group code used by the writers to address a community with which they share multilingual competences, as well as specialised knowledge.