The article deals with the investigation of some words of Romani origin which are considered to have fallen into desuetude or to be in the exclusive use of marginal groups of population. These words, however, appear in the colloquial language of the Spanish Internet users who, from the statistical point of view, are far from being qualified as marginal groups.
This article focuses on the methodology of sociolinguistic investigation and it proposes several innovations of the traditional methods (Internet, electronic questionnaire, corpus). The results of the Internet research are compared with data in the dictionaries.
The investigation offers some new informations about the diffusion and meaning modification of the words of interest.