Related papers: Using Sociolinguistic Variables to Reveal Changing…
Language change is a complex social phenomenon, revealing pathways of communication and sociocultural influence. But, while language change has long been a topic of study in sociolinguistics, traditional linguistic research methods rely on…
We present a study of the relationship between gender, linguistic style, and social networks, using a novel corpus of 14,000 Twitter users. Prior quantitative work on gender often treats this social variable as a female/male binary; we…
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…
Our usage of language is not solely reliant on cognition but is arguably determined by myriad external factors leading to a global variability of linguistic patterns. This issue, which lies at the core of sociolinguistics and is backed by…
Studying the ways in which language is gendered has long been an area of interest in sociolinguistics. Studies have explored, for example, the speech of male and female characters in film and the language used to describe male and female…
Languages emerge and change over time at the population level though interactions between individual speakers. It is, however, hard to directly observe how a single speaker's linguistic innovation precipitates a population-wide change in…
We analyze gendered communities defined in three different ways: text, users, and sentiment. Differences across these representations reveal facets of communities' distinctive identities, such as social group, topic, and attitudes. Two…
A large body of research on gender-linked language has established foundations regarding cross-gender differences in lexical, emotional, and topical preferences, along with their sociological underpinnings. We compile a novel, large and…
Language change is influenced by many factors, but often starts from synchronic variation, where multiple linguistic patterns or forms coexist, or where different speech communities use language in increasingly different ways. Besides…
We propose a new computational approach for tracking and detecting statistically significant linguistic shifts in the meaning and usage of words. Such linguistic shifts are especially prevalent on the Internet, where the rapid exchange of…
The extent to which men and women use language differently has been questioned previously. Finding clear and consistent gender differences in language is not conclusive in general, and the research is heavily influenced by the context and…
We introduce a framework for quantifying semantic variation of common words in Communities of Practice and in sets of topic-related communities. We show that while some meaning shifts are shared across related communities, others are…
In multilingual societies, it is common to encounter different language varieties. Various approaches have been proposed to discuss different mechanisms of language shift. However, current models exploring language shift in languages in…
The purpose of this study is to find evidence for supporting the hypothesis that language is the mirror of our thinking, our prejudices and cultural stereotypes. In this analysis, a questionnaire was administered to 537 people. The answers…
Languages are continuously undergoing changes, and the mechanisms that underlie these changes are still a matter of debate. In this work, we approach language evolution through the lens of causality in order to model not only how various…
The processes leading to change in languages are manifold. In order to reduce ambiguity in the transmission of information, agreement on a set of conventions for recurring problems is favored. In addition to that, speakers tend to use…
Variation in language is ubiquitous, particularly in newer forms of writing such as social media. Fortunately, variation is not random, it is often linked to social properties of the author. In this paper, we show how to exploit social…
Understanding the impact of digital platforms on user behavior presents foundational challenges, including issues related to polarization, misinformation dynamics, and variation in news consumption. Comparative analyses across platforms and…
Recent research has demonstrated that large pre-trained language models reflect societal biases expressed in natural language. The present paper introduces a simple method for probing language models to conduct a multilingual study of…
This paper investigates biases of Large Language Models (LLMs) through the lens of grammatical gender. Drawing inspiration from seminal works in psycholinguistics, particularly the study of gender's influence on language perception, we…