English

Modeling Topics and Sociolinguistic Variation in Code-Switched Discourse: Insights from Spanish-English and Spanish-Guaran\'i

Computation and Language 2025-12-04 v1

Abstract

This study presents an LLM-assisted annotation pipeline for the sociolinguistic and topical analysis of bilingual discourse in two typologically distinct contexts: Spanish-English and Spanish-Guaran\'i. Using large language models, we automatically labeled topic, genre, and discourse-pragmatic functions across a total of 3,691 code-switched sentences, integrated demographic metadata from the Miami Bilingual Corpus, and enriched the Spanish-Guaran\'i dataset with new topic annotations. The resulting distributions reveal systematic links between gender, language dominance, and discourse function in the Miami data, and a clear diglossic division between formal Guaran\'i and informal Spanish in Paraguayan texts. These findings replicate and extend earlier interactional and sociolinguistic observations with corpus-scale quantitative evidence. The study demonstrates that large language models can reliably recover interpretable sociolinguistic patterns traditionally accessible only through manual annotation, advancing computational methods for cross-linguistic and low-resource bilingual research.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2512.03334,
  title  = {Modeling Topics and Sociolinguistic Variation in Code-Switched Discourse: Insights from Spanish-English and Spanish-Guaran\'i},
  author = {Nemika Tyagi and Nelvin Licona Guevara and Olga Kellert},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.03334},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

10 pages, 4 figures