Speech Genres of the Social Network Instagram in the Spanish Segment

Abstract

The purpose of this particular article is to analyse the main features of the Spanish speech genres of the Instagram’s content being a social network and an application used to share photos and videos. Nowadays the topic is completely up to date because in Spanish-speaking countries there are a huge number of Instagram followers, which often is significantly greater than the number of users of any other social platform. Instagram is a special type of digital communication that has defined speech genres. The Instagram discourse is a hypertext − a structure that includes links to other texts. The underlying Instagram genre is a post that contains a photo or a video with a short text message. The post, in turn, can be presented by various sub-genres depending on the communicative purpose of the author: self-presentation, news, gratitude, congratulations, advice, request, invitation, appeal, obituary, advertisement, and joke. Stories are a separate Instagram genre with special purposes and functions. They are audiovisual content that has a limited lifespan, unlike a regular post. The article highlights such features of Instagram speech genres as interactivity, the polycode nature of messages (communication takes place in different levels − verbal and visual), the usage of hashtags and the availability of comments. Digital comment itself is a speech genre; it is characterized by informality, brevity and emotionality typical of oral communication. The conducted study allows us to conclude that the boundaries of Instagram speech genres are blurred. At the same time genres are closely connected, they often mix, they change due to the constant updating of the digital platform itself. The source of the illustrative material of this article was the content of the profiles of Spanish-speaking Instagram users, both private individuals and organizations.