The following study deals with politeness and the degree to which it is employed by Swedes and native Spanish speakers, or Hispanos, when speaking Spanish. Also dealt with are the perceptions these speakers have regarding their personal proficiencies in Spanish as well as others’ and the extent to which politeness is utilised during discourse in Spanish between the people claiming these ethnic identities. The ethnic identities studied are Swedes and Hispanos living in Sweden, speaking both Spanish and Swedish fluently. The study serves to investigate the probability of one ethnic group being more polite than the other and seeks to determine which one it is. The use of a questionnaire was made to gather information to be used to resolve the research questions in addition to proving the various hypotheses. A total of 60 questionnaires were handed out, with each one containing 54 questions encompassing a number of subjects. Out of these 60 questionnaires, 45 were returned. Additionally, the respondents were grouped into two sets. The first included persons perceived by the author to be Hispanos, the second included persons perceived to be Swedish. The questionnaires were divided equally among these two groups. The resulting information was then applied to the hypotheses and used to respond to the research questions. The results of this investigation showed that both Swedes and Hispanos were more polite when speaking Spanish with Swedes, although the Hispanos are shown to generally be more polite. Although answering every research question, the results proved only the final hipothesis, effectively rendering the first two hypotheses incorrect.

Computer-mediated communication (CMC) is a relatively new field made even more difficult to investigate by the continuous progress and changes of the digital world. There is a multitude of research on CMC from a linguistic perspective; however, the vastness of the online world makes it difficult to determine to what extent it is a welcoming or hostile environment. The existing studies of polite and impolite language use in CMC provide some insight into the type of environment found online though there is a notable lack of information regarding the overall proportionality of impolite language use, specifically violent and aggressive language use. This study aims to explore to what extent violent and aggressive language use is present in user generated comments found on the social media platform YouTube by investigating the semantic fields of violence and aggression. It is a corpus-based study of the topmost comments collected from the most popular videos in the year 2023 in the YouTube category of Reviews. The quantitative content analysis reveals that both violent and aggressive language use is present in the comments though infrequently with violent language use having a normalized frequency of 2.1 times per thousand words and aggressive language use 2.6 times per thousand words. The qualitative pragmatic analysis of the observed instances shows that only one instance carries out the illocutionary act of violence in addition to the locutionary act. Based on these findings it appears violent and aggressive language use is relatively infrequent concerning more neutral topics and in most cases the communicators do not have violent or aggressive intent in their messages.