Correntino Spanish Memes and the Enregisterment of Argentine Guarani Loanwords

Abstract

The intense contact between Guarani and Spanish in the Argentine province of Corrientes has produced a wide array of mutual contact effects, the most visible being widespread borrowing in both directions. This article examines a previously unreported feature of Argentine Guarani loans in Correntino Spanish: the social value they have acquired. Building on the growing body of work in sociolinguistics on internet memes, which are sites of phenomena rich in sociolinguistic value, an analysis is provided of Argentine Guarani loans in Correntino Spanish using an original corpus of memes collected from Correntino Instagram pages. Such memes, whose intended audience is monolingual, are a valuable source of Correntino Spanish features, which are used for humorous, ironic, or nostalgic effect. Via analysis of the relationship between these loans and the kinds of memes they appear in, I show that these loans have undergone enregisterment, i.e., they have taken on additional social meaning that allows them to index a complex variety of ideological stances toward Correntino social phenomena and character types. The results of this process evidence the fact that language contact, as an engine of variation, creates fertile ground for the emergence of social meaning and that memes are a productive and promising window into the (re)creation and evolution of such meaning.