A Linguistic Overview of WhatsApp Communication
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Abstract
Today, digital discourse has become a mode of communication that is both widespread and global, WhatsApp being one of the most popular Instant Messaging tools. WhatsApp-supported communication is thus gradually attracting the attention of researchers. The present volume seeks to contribute to this field of linguistics by providing a critical review of the state-of-the-art of WhatsApp studies. With this aim in mind, different types of sources were evaluated and the retrieved documents were classified into two main thematic domains. On the one hand, references that focused on WhatsApp linguistic characteristics were included: status notifications, multimodal elements such as emojis or memes and language variations, among others. On the other, works that described the use of WhatsApp to learn English as a foreign or second language (EFL/ESL) were reviewed. Based on this critical literature review, it was possible to detect relevant lines of future research.