Relationship between ideology and language in the Catalan independence context

TL;DR

It is proved that there is a clear relationship between political positions and the use of language, showing that against independence users speak mainly Spanish while pro-independence users speak Catalan and Spanish almost indistinctly.

Abstract

Political polarization generates strong effects on society, driving controversial debates and influencing the institutions. Territorial disputes are one of the most important polarized scenarios and have been consistently related to the use of language. In this work, we analyzed the opinion and language distributions through Twitter data of a particular territorial dispute around the independence of Catalonia. We infer a continuous opinion distribution by applying a model based on retweet interactions, previously detecting elite users with fixed and antagonist opinions. The resulting distribution presents a mainly bimodal behavior with an intermediate third pole that shows a less polarized society with the presence of not only antagonist opinions. We find that the more active, engaged and influential users hold more extreme positions. Also we prove that there is a clear relationship between political positions and the use of language, showing that against independence users speak mainly Spanish while pro-independence users speak Catalan and Spanish almost indistinctly. However, the third pole, closer in political opinion to the pro-independence pole, behaves similarly to the against-independence one concerning the use of language.

Figures (10)

• Figure 1: Temporal evolution of the number of tweets published in a Twitter conversation about the Catalan independence issue from 09/11/2017 to 11/04/2017. The three highest activity peaks match the off-line events of: the referendum day (1-0), the Catalonia independence declaration signed and suspended on the same day, and the Unilateral Declaration of Independence (DUI) and the enforcement of the Article 155 of the Spanish Constitution.
• Figure 2: Left: opinion distribution of all the users and of the users with an activity corresponding to more than 10 tweets in the Catalan independence conversation. Right: distribution of user activity. Grey area shows the percentage of users that have posted less than 10 tweets in the whole period.
• Figure 3: Comparison of the effect of activity, influence and engagement on the users' opinion distribution in a Catalan independences Twitter conversation. Results are filtered by activity (blue), retweets received (purple) and days of participation (pink) for three different threshold values increasing from top to bottom panels.
• Figure 4: Time evolution of the daily distributions of opinion index ($X_i$) for the Catalan independence twitter conversation. Color indicates the number of users that participate each day. The three days framed in red correspond to the three activity peaks observed in Figure \ref{['fig:timeseries']}.
• Figure 5: Temporal evolution of the number of users and the normalized pole distance (d), relative population size ($\Delta A$) and the polarization index $\mu$ for the Catalan independence conversation.