Social media and ethnicity in Central Africa

Abstract

The use of social media by Africans and African diasporas has led to the creation of "Facebook groups" identified as ethnic groups. These spaces for community exchanges allow the observation of original modalities of preservation of linguistic diversity mutations in the etnic belonging. On one hand we are witnessing the encoding of languages that were not usually written, contributing to their current writing use, to the transmission of this competence ans literary heritage, to its unification and homogenization. On the other hand, these new communication registers orivoke profound changes in the status of these languages and have led to reconcile and rethink the family of mutual understanding languages as an ethnic group in its own.