Lo sviluppo del genere dei memes all'interno della comunità virtuale Stan Twitter e la loro connessione con l'inglese afro-americano vernacolare (AAVE) - I casi di "Chile anyway so" e "Period"

Over the last decades, the rise of social media platforms has led to the birth of a new variety of English called ‘Internet English’, composed of its own grammar, syntax and that is only employed in Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC). A social network can be described as a virtual place that facilitates connections with people and interests. Furthermore, it is also the place in which different social and cultural backgrounds occur and new language identities and communities develop. As a matter of fact, people who constantly use the Internet have developed new, creative ways to create meaning. Twitter is home to one of the many virtual communities that inhabit the microblogging service: the so-called Stan Twitter, formed by groups of stans defined as “someone who greatly admires a […] famous person, to an extent that is unusual” by The Cambridge Dictionary. As other web users, they are familiar with Internet memes that are “[…] a piece of culture, typically a joke, which gains influence through online transmission” according to Patrick Davison (2012: 122). However, the language used both on Stan Twitter and its memes mostly draws from African-American Vernacular English (AAVE), and is, therefore, accused of cultural appropriation. Consequently, we focused our attention on Stan Twitter memes through the perspective of translanguaging. First, we identified Pop Crave Twitter (@PopCrave), one of the main sources for celebrity news, as the primary resource from which we started to gather data for our research. First, we collected 510 replies to 115 Pop Crave tweets (140-character messages) from 2020 containing images, GIFs, and videos. Second, we determined the most popular ones by dividing them according to Wiggins and Bowers’ (2014) categories: spreadable media, emergent memes, and memes. The other aim of our research is to further investigate the connection between Stan Twitter and AAVE by examining the two most recurrent memes in 2020: the “Chile anyway so” and “Period” memes. In conclusion, since anonymity plays a key role on Stan Twitter, establishing whether it culturally appropriates slang terms that belong to AAVE is challenging as race is not easily recognizable on social media. However, through the perspective of translanguaging, we have analyzed the different linguistic and non-linguistic resources Stan accounts makes use of when producing memes with the aim of creating meaning.