Investigating the diffusion of morphosyntactic innovations using social media

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We propose to research the way in which changes in the grammar of languages ("innovations") spread out from a small number of speakers to a larger section of the population ("diffusion"). The types of data gathered by traditional means are not especially well-suited to studying diffusion processes. Dialectologists have traditionally gathered data by surveying speakers at a large range of different localities. However, it is usually impractical to survey a large number of speakers at each locality, meaning that such surveys do poorly when there is variation between speakers living in the same places (as is usually the case during ongoing change). Sociolinguists typically interview a large number of speakers at a single locality; it is possible to then investigate diffusion processes by comparing such datasets, but this only ever offers a very limited geographical range. Accordingly, we propose to use data from social-media platforms such as Twitter to investigate diffusion processes. Although a form of written language, social-media data tend to be highly informal and often provide a good approximation to spoken data. By using data from social media, we will be able to gather a very large quantity of localised data from many places across large areas. We will explore new ways of using social media data to investigate language variation and change and demonstrate the effectiveness of using such data to investigate geospatial diffusion and change in grammatical patterns.We will use Twitter to collect three datasets ("corpora") of tweets in English and Welsh in Britain, and in Norwegian in Norway covering a period of nine months. The selection of these three languages enables us to compare the effect of different demographic and geographic scenarios on patterns of diffusion: Welsh as a minority/lesser-used language vs. English and Norwegian as majority languages; low population density in Norway vs. higher population density in much of England; etc. We will supplement these Twitter corpora with additional data obtained by data-scraping from Norwegian- and Welsh-language-specific social media.We will then identify language changes currently diffusing in these populations and investigate their distribution in these corpora. Changes we expect to investigate include the spread of a new second-person pronoun 'chdi' ('you') in Welsh, the spread of future constructions with 'komme til å' and 'bli å' in Norwegian and changes in the syntax of constructions with 'need' in English (such as 'you need your hair washing' vs. 'you need your hair washed'). By identifying all instances of both the innovative and the older option(s) in our corpora we will be able to map where each different option is typically used. By comparing these findings with geographical patterns known from earlier studies or identified in other datasets, we will be able to map the spread of new forms over time and so identify the properties of processes of diffusion. In this way, we will be able to answer questions such as: do changes in these speech communities spread continuously over land ("contagious diffusion") or jump from city to city before reaching rural regions ("hierarchical diffusion")? Is this mode of diffusion affected by the type of change in question, by the demographics of the region or by some other factors?We will use interactions between users in our corpora (retweets, @direct messages, mutual following) to construct a model of these users' social network. We will then be able to compare the effectiveness of this network model as a predictor of the pathway of diffusion to the geographical model. Our results will be demonstrated in action through web-apps that predict users' origins using their responses to questions about their language use and they will furthermore be made available to the public via an online atlas-style website.