Socioeconomic dependencies of linguistic patterns in twitter: A multivariate analysis

Jacob Levy Abitbol, Márton Karsai, Jean Philippe Magué, Jean Pierre Chevrot, Eric Fleury

Research output: Contribution to Book/Report typesConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract (may include machine translation)

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 many small-scale studies on face-to-face communication, is addressed here by constructing a dataset combining the largest French Twitter corpus to date with detailed socioeconomic maps obtained from national census in France. We show how key linguistic variables measured in individual Twitter streams depend on factors like socioeconomic status, location, time, and the social network of individuals. We found that (i) people of higher socioeconomic status, active to a greater degree during the daytime, use a more standard language; (ii) the southern part of the country is more prone to use more standard language than the northern one, while locally the used variety or dialect is determined by the spatial distribution of socioeconomic status; and (iii) individuals connected in the social network are closer linguistically than disconnected ones, even after the effects of status homophily have been removed. Our results inform sociolinguistic theory and may inspire novel learning methods for the inference of socioeconomic status of people from the way they tweet.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationThe Web Conference 2018 - Proceedings of the World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2018
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages1125-1134
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9781450356398
DOIs
StatePublished - 10 Apr 2018
Externally publishedYes
Event27th International World Wide Web, WWW 2018 - Lyon, France
Duration: 23 Apr 201827 Apr 2018

Publication series

NameThe Web Conference 2018 - Proceedings of the World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2018

Conference

Conference27th International World Wide Web, WWW 2018
Country/TerritoryFrance
CityLyon
Period23/04/1827/04/18

Keywords

  • Computational sociolinguistics
  • Social network analysis
  • Socioeconomic status inference
  • Spatiotemporal data
  • Twitter data

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