Puerto Rican language use on MySpace.com

The social networking site MySpace.com has quickly become a venue in which Puerto Ricans are able to communicate among themselves within a larger global community, resulting in an interesting range of language use. After examining the amount of Puerto Rican users, the researcher uses five aspects of MySpace.com profiles to analyze language use in fifty profiles of Puerto Ricans ages 18 to 22. The final portion of the paper is a case study of three profiles highlighting current use of Puerto Rican Spanish and netspeak. The paper concludes that many Puerto Rican users of MySpace.com live in a bilingual linguistic reality floating between Spanish and English.