Twitter and the Real Academia Española: perspectives on impoliteness

Abstract This study presents first- and second-order approaches to impoliteness as found in the Twitter feed of the Real Academia Española, the official Spanish-language institution of the Hispanic world. We argue that impoliteness must be viewed from the perspective of the individual, reflecting their background experiences and knowledge, while also acknowledging norms of their communities. We collected 56 reactive tweets in threads among different users, generating dialogues of different opinions of (dis)agreement. Fourteen participant-viewers rated each user’s tweet and provided judgments and comments on the impoliteness on a 5-point scale. Our results indicate some commonalities among subgroups in terms of politeness norms (e.g., insults), but also show individual differences in terms of expectations (e.g., not doing one’s job). The results suggest the limitations of previous impoliteness frameworks, which apply mostly to face-to-face interactions. Our research points to a need to develop a framework of impoliteness to account for the complexity of the interactions in social media and consider an analysis at individual and community levels.