Bilinguals’ Use of English and Spanish Digitalk on Facebook Status Updates

The purpose of this multiple case study was to examine the ways in which six Hispanic, English-Spanish bilingual college students and college graduates used nonstandard writing (digitalk) to communicate through Facebook status updates and their reasons for doing so. The study consisted of three sources of data: Facebook status updates, one-on-one interview responses, and group interview responses. Based on an analysis of the data, it is probable that participants engaged in digitalk in both English and Spanish to achieve a variety of purposes. The similarities found between participants’ English and Spanish digitalk may be indicative of participants’ reliance on what Cummins (1991) refers to as Common Underlying Proficiencies in which languages rely on a single processing system.