Diatopic variation in digital space
What Twitter can tell us about Texas English dialect areas
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7146/sss.v14i2.142539Keywords:
Texas English, diatopic variation, dialectology, Twitter, computer-mediated discourse, register, multidimensional analysisAbstract
The availability of large amounts of social media text offers tremendous potential for studies of diatopic variation. A case in point is the linguistic geography of Texas, which is at present insufficiently described in traditional dialectological research. This paper summarises previous work on diatopic variation in Texas English on the basis of Twitter and presents an approach that foregrounds functional interpretability over a maximally clear geographical signal. In a multi-dimensional analysis based on 45 linguistic features in over 3 million tweets from across the state, two dimensions of variation are identified that pattern in geographically meaningful ways. The first of these relates to creative uses of typography and distinguishes urban centres from the rest of the state. The second dimension encompasses characteristics of interpersonal, spoken discourse and shows an East-West geographical divide. While the linguistic features of relevance for the dimensions are not generally considered in dialectological research, their geographic patterning reflects major tendencies attested in the literature on diatopic variation in Texas.[1]
[1]I am grateful to Alex Rosenfeld for sharing his data with me. This work was initially presented at a panel on Twitter in sociolinguistic research at NWAV 49, organised by Stef Grondelaers and Jane Stuart-Smith. I would like to thank both of them for giving me this opportunity and the attendees of the panel, especially Lars Hinrichs and Alex Rosenfeld, for fruitful discussion. Finally, my gratitude goes to Erling Strudsholm and Anita Berit Hansen for their invitation to participate on the Coseriu Symposium and their patience in organising this special issue.
References
Atwood, Bagby. 1962. The regional vocabulary of Texas. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Austen, Martha. 2017. Put the groceries up: Comparing Black and White regional variation. American Speech 92 (3), 298–320.
Bailey, Guy. 1991. Directions of change in Texas English. Journal of American Culture 14 (2), 125–134.
Baugh, Albert. 1935. A history of the English language, first edition. New York; London: D. Appleton-Century.
Biber, Douglas. 1988. Variation across speech and writing. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press.
Biber, Douglas and Edward Finegan (eds.). 1994. Sociolinguistic perspectives on register. New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bohmann, Axel. 2019. Variation in English worldwide: Registers and global varieties (Studies in English Language). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bruns, Axel and Hallvard Moe. 2014. Structural layers of communication on Twitter. Twitter and society (Digital Formations vol. 89), ed. by Katrin Weller, Axel Bruns, Jean Burgess, Merja Mahrt, and Cornelius Puschmann, 15–28. New York: Peter Lang.
Cattell, Raymond. 1966. The scree test for the number of factors. Multivariate Behavioral Research 1 (2), 245–276.
Clarke, Isobelle and Jack Grieve. 2019. Stylistic variation on the Donald Trump Twitter account: A linguistic analysis of tweets posted between 2009 and 2018. PloS One 14(9).
Coseriu, Eugenio. 1955. La geografía lingüística. Montevideo: Universidad de la República, Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias.
Cukor-Avila, Patricia, Lisa Jeon, Patricia Rector, Chetan Tiwari, and Zak Shelton. 2012. “Texas – It’s like a whole nuther country”: Mapping Texans’ perceptions of dialect variation in the Lone Star State. Texas Linguistics Forum 55, 10–19.
Eisenstein, Jacob. 2015. Systematic patterning in phonologically-motivated orthographic variation. Journal of Sociolinguistics 19 (2), 161–188.
Eisenstein, Jacob. 2018. Identifying regional dialects in on-line social media. The Handbook of Dialectology, ed. by Charles Boberg, John Nerbonne, and Dominic Watt, 368–383. Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley-Blackwell.
Eisenstein, Jacob, Brendan O’Connor, Noah A. Smith, and Eric P. Xing. 2010. A latent variable model for geographic lexical variation. Proceedings of the 2010 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP ’10), 1277–1287. Stroudsburg, PA, USA: Association for Computational Linguistics.
Eisenstein, Jacob, Brendan O’Connor, Noah A. Smith, and Eric P. Xing. 2014. Diffusion of lexical change in social media. PLoS ONE 9(11).
Gonçalves, Bruno, Lucía Loureiro-Porto, José Ramasco, and David Sánchez. 2018. Mapping the Americanization of English in space and time. PLoS ONE 13(5): e0197741.
Gorsuch, Richard L. 2015. Factor analysis. Classic edition. New York; London: Routledge.
Grieve, Jack. 2016. Regional variation in written American English (Studies in English Language). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Grieve, Jack, Chris Montgomery, Andrea Nini, Akira Murakami, and Diansheng Guo. 2019. Mapping lexical dialect variation in British English using Twitter. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence 2.
Hinrichs, Lars, Axel Bohmann, and Kyle Gorman. 2013. Real-time trends in the Texas English vowel system: F2 trajectory in GOOSE as an index of a variety's ongoing delocalization. Rice Working Papers in Linguistics 4.
Hovy, Dirk and Christoph Purschke. 2018. Capturing regional variation with distributed place representations and geographic retrofitting. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 4383–4394. Brussels, Belgium: Association for Computational Linguistics.
Iorio, Josh. 2009. Effects of audience on orthographic variation. Studies in the Linguistic Sciences: Illinois Working Papers, 127–140.
Jones, Taylor. 2015. Toward a description of African American Vernacular English dialect regions using “Black Twitter.” American Speech 90 (4), 403–440.
Koch, Peter and Wulff Oesterreicher. 1985. Sprache der Nähe - Sprache der Distanz. Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit um Spannungsfeld von Sprachtheorie und Sprachgeschichte. Romanistisches Jahrbuch 36 (85), 15–43.
Kretzschmar, William A. 2015. Language and complex systems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kurath, Hans. 1949. Word geography of the Eastern United States. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Labov, William, Sharon Ash, and Charles Boberg. 2005. The atlas of North American English: Phonetics, phonology and sound change. Berlin; New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Le, Quoc and Tomas Mikolov. 2014. Distributed representations of sentences and documents. arXiv:1405.4053 [cs]. http://arxiv.org/abs/1405.4053.
Louf, Thomas, Bruno Gonçalves, José Ramasco, David Sánchez, and Jack Grieve. 2023. American cultural regions mapped through the lexical analysis of social media. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 10, Article 133.
R Core Team. 2022. R: A language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna, Austria: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. https://www.R-project.org/.
Rosenfeld, Alex B. 2019. Computational models of changes in language use. Austin, TX: The University of Texas at Austin doctoral dissertation.
Russ, Brice. 2012. Examining large-scale regional variation through online geotagged corpora. Conference presentation at the 2012 ADS Meeting. Portland, OR, 06 January 2012.
Solt, Frederick and Yue Hu. 2018. dotwhisker: Dot-and-whisker plots of regression results. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=dotwhisker.
Squires, Lauren. 2015. Twitter: Design, discourse, and the implications for public text. The Routledge Handbook of Language and Digital Communication, ed. by Alexandra Georgakopoulou; Tereza Spilioti, 239–256. London: Routledge.
Stevenson, Jonathan. 2016. Dialect in digitally mediated written interaction: a survey of the geohistorical distribution of the ditransitive in British English using Twitter. York, UK: University of York MA dissertation.
Strelluf, Christopher. 2020. Needs + PAST PARTICIPLE in regional Englishes on Twitter. World Englishes 39 (1), 119–134.
Takhteyev, Yuri, Anatoliy Gruzd, and Barry Wellman. 2012. Geography of Twitter networks. Social Networks 34 (1), 73–81.
Thompson, Bruce. 2004. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis: Understanding concepts and applications. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Underwood, Gary. 1990. Scholarly responsibility and the representation of dialects: The case of English in Texas. Journal of English Linguistics. 23 (1–2), 95–113.
Van Halteren, Hans. 2021. Pitfalls in tweet-based variation studies. Conference presentation at NWAV 49, The University of Texas at Austin. Austin, TX, 22 October 2021.
Ward, Joe H. 1963. Hierarchical grouping to optimize an objective function. Journal of the American Statistical Association 58 (301), 236–244.
Yaqub M. 2022. How many tweets per day 2022 (number of tweets per day). Renolon. Smart Insights. https://www.renolon.com/number-of-tweets-per-day/. (12 November, 2022).
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2023 Axel Bohmann
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
