Lay people's reactions to media and metalinguistic discourses on Andalusian on YouTube

Abstract

In this paper we analyse, from a critical sociolinguistic perspective, the reactions of the general audience to an informative discourse about the speech
of Andalusia, entitled Tesis: Habla andaluza. It is a television documentary, which was, following the broadcast, posted on the YouTube video portal in order to achieve even greater dissemination to the general public. The other part of the corpus represents a monograph study La identidad lingüística de Andalucía, written by eminent Andalusian linguists, of which two take part in the mentioned chapter of the program Tesis. Both the documentary and the book outline the most important (socio)linguistic characteristics of Andalusian and of its study, according to their particular formats and target audience: the monograph is a rigorous scientific work that is directed more to the specialists in the field of linguistics, while the documentary provides only a summary of the most important facts in accordance with the specific form of short documentary aimed at a more general audience. Our aim was to compare these two formats that promote scientific knowledge and to investigate the extent to which they meet their goals. We hope that our findings will contribute to a more appropriate and systematic disclosure of metalinguistic knowledge as this could significantly increase the linguistic culture of the general public.