Sociolinguistic analysis of Twitter in multilingual societies

Abstract

In a multilingual society, language not only reflects culture and heritage, but also has implications for social status and the degree of integration in society. Different languages can be a barrier between monolingual communities, and the dynamics of language choice could explain the prosperity or demise of local languages in an international setting. We study this interplay of language and network structure in diverse, multi-lingual societies, using Twitter. In our analysis, we are particularly interested in the role of bilinguals. Concretely, we attempt to quantify the degree to which users are the "bridge-builders" between monolingual language groups, while monolingual users cluster together. Also, with the revalidation of English as a lingua franca on Twitter, we reveal users of the native non-English language have higher influence than English users, and the language convergence pattern is consistent across the regions. Furthermore, we explore for which topics these users prefer their native language rather than English. To the best of our knowledge, this is the largest sociolinguistic study in a network setting. © 2014 ACM.