Journal Article

Diffusion of Lexical Change in Social Media

Eisenstein, Jacob, Smith, Noah A., Xing, Eric P., O'Connor, Brendan

2014

Overview

Computer-mediated communication is driving fundamental changes in the nature of written language. We investigate these changes by statistical analysis of a dataset comprising 107 million Twitter messages (authored by 2.7 million unique user accounts). Using a latent vector autoregressive model to aggregate across thousands of words, we identify high-level patterns in diffusion of linguistic change over the United States. Our model is robust to unpredictable changes in Twitter's sampling rate, and provides a probabilistic characterization of the relationship of macro-scale linguistic influence to a set of demographic and geographic predictors. The results of this analysis offer support for prior arguments that focus on geographical proximity and population size. However, demographic similarity - especially with regard to race - plays an even more central role, as cities with similar racial demographics are far more likely to share linguistic influence. Rather than moving towards a single unified \"netspeak\" dialect, language evolution in computer-mediated communication reproduces existing fault lines in spoken American English.

• Publisher: Public Library of Science,Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Subject: American English / Autoregressive models / Autoregressive processes / Biology and Life Sciences / Changes / Communication / Computer and Information Sciences / Computer mediated communication / Computer science / Demographics / Demography / Dialects / Diffusion / Digital media / Ethnicity / Fault lines / Geography / Geological faults / Human communication / Humans / Language / Language change / Language shift / Linguistics / Local elections / Mass media / Models, Statistical / Origin of language / Phonetics / Physical sciences / Population (statistical) / Population number / Proximity / Quantitative analysis / Race / Research and Analysis Methods / Researchers / Sampling / Semantic change / Social interactions / Social Media / Social networks / Social Sciences / Statistical analysis / Technological change / Terminology as Topic / Time series / United States - ethnology / Vocabulary / Written language