Beliefs about Romanian-Spanish Intercomprehension : Mutual Intelligibility in Q&A Forums : An Approach to Reddit and Quora

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This paper is a first approach to the beliefs about the intercomprehension/intelligibility between Spanish and Romanian, expressed by speakers in spontaneous discourses. The difficulty of documenting them has led us to explore the possibilities of extracting information from Q&A platforms, such as Reddit and Quora. These platforms allow users to pose questions and get answers on various topics, including languages. Q&A platforms make a lot of identified data available and are relatively easy to access and extract. The choice of Romanian and Spanish responds to the fact that both are languages which have ample spaces for contact, including the virtual space, which offers many possibilities for spontaneous discourse. The data obtained have allowed us to create a corpus of spontaneous interactions of Q&A platforms, the CorQ&A corpus. Despite the inefficiency in data retrieval, we gathered enough information to advance our objective and synthesize beliefs about the intercomprehension of Romanian and Spanish with other Romance languages.