Linguistic Divergence Research Articles

Evolving linguistic divergence on polarizing social media

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 regional or economic reasons, communities may form and segregate based on political alignment. The latter, referred to as political polarization, is of growing societal concern across the world. Here we map and quantify linguistic divergence across the partisan left-right divide in the United States, using social media data. We develop a general methodology to delineate (social) media users by their political preference, based on which (potentially biased) news media accounts they do and do not follow on a given platform. Our data consists of 1.5M short posts by 10k users (about 20M words) from the social media platform Twitter (now “X”). Delineating this sample involved mining the platform for the lists of followers (n = 422M) of 72 large news media accounts. We quantify divergence in topics of conversation and word frequencies, messaging sentiment, and lexical semantics of words and emoji. We find signs of linguistic divergence across all these aspects, especially in topics and themes of conversation, in line with previous research. While US American English remains largely intelligible within its large speech community, our findings point at areas where miscommunication may eventually arise given ongoing polarization and therefore potential linguistic divergence. Our flexible methodology — combining data mining, lexicostatistics, machine learning, large language models and a systematic human annotation approach — is largely language and platform agnostic. In other words, while we focus here on US political divides and US English, the same approach is applicable to other countries, languages, and social media platforms.

Dialect differences and linguistic divergence

Abstract This article presents a new type of comparative linguistic survey, analyzing (socio)linguistic variation in a database of 1,155 grammatical constructions drawn from 42 diverse languages. We focus in particular on variation in the expression of grammatical meanings, and the extent to which grammatical variation differentiates geographic dialects. This is the first study we know of to present a systematic, crosslinguistic survey of dialect differentiation. We identify three main structural types of grammatical variation—form, order, and omission—and find that in situations of close contact between dialects, where signaling of distinct group identities is more relevant, form variables are more likely to differentiate dialects than the other two types. Order and omission variables usually only differentiate dialects that have minimal contact. Our survey suggests that social signaling may have a substantial role in the divergence of grammars, and provides systematic support for previous proposals regarding convergence and divergence under contact.

Reordering of Source Side for a Factored English to Manipuri SMT System

Similar languages with massive parallel corpora are readily implemented by large-scale systems using either Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) or Neural Machine Translation (NMT). Translations involving low-resource language pairs with linguistic divergence have always been a challenge. We consider one such pair, English-Manipuri, which shows linguistic divergence and belongs to the low resource category. For such language pairs, SMT gets better acclamation than NMT. However, SMT’s more prominent phrase- based model uses groupings of surface word forms treated as phrases for translation. Therefore, without any linguistic knowledge, it fails to learn a proper mapping between the source and target language symbols. Our model adopts a factored model of SMT (FSMT3*) with a part-of-speech (POS) tag as a factor to incorporate linguistic information about the languages followed by hand-coded reordering. The reordering of source sentences makes them similar to the target language allowing better mapping between source and target symbols. The reordering also converts long-distance reordering problems to monotone reordering that SMT models can better handle, thereby reducing the load during decoding time. Additionally, we discover that adding a POS feature data enhances the system’s precision. Experimental results using automatic evaluation metrics show that our model improved over phrase-based and other factored models using the lexicalised Moses reordering options. Our FSMT3* model shows an increase in the automatic scores of translation result over the factored model with lexicalised phrase reordering (FSMT2) by an amount of 11.05% (Bilingual Evaluation Understudy), 5.46% (F1), 9.35% (Precision), and 2.56% (Recall), respectively.

Correlation of Similarities and Differences in the Croatian and Serbian Languages

The article introduces a comparative analysis of some interlingual variant formations in the linguistic structures of the Croatian and the Serbian literary languages. The general integration processes that occurred in the Slavic linguistic world in the XIX and the early second half of the XX centuries did not unite individual Slavic languages or their variants. By the end of the XX century, linguistic convergence was replaced by linguistic divergence. After the collapse of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the new states that arose in the post-Yugoslavian space fixed the status of Croatian and Serbian as official languages. At present, Croatian and Serbian have their own codified norms; they develop and function autonomously and independently in different ethnic cultures and states. The widening gap between the post-Yugoslavian states of Serbia and Croatia contributed to the interlingual divergence between these languages. Their linguistic structure has multiple differences at phonetic, phonological, grammatical, lexical, syntactic, and stylistic levels. This research showed that the most prominent differences occur at the lexical level. As for linguistic standardization and codification, the Croatian language reveals a prescriptive-descriptive approach to language regulation, while Serbian is characterized by a descriptive-prescriptive approach. The authors illustrate this conclusion by various intervariant or equivalent language units from parallel reference books and online discourse.

A global analysis of matches and mismatches between human genetic and linguistic histories

Human history is written in both our genes and our languages. The extent to which our biological and linguistic histories are congruent has been the subject of considerable debate, with clear examples of both matches and mismatches. To disentangle the patterns of demographic and cultural transmission, we need a global systematic assessment of matches and mismatches. Here, we assemble a genomic database (GeLaTo, or Genes and Languages Together) specifically curated to investigate genetic and linguistic diversity worldwide. We find that most populations in GeLaTo that speak languages of the same language family (i.e., that descend from the same ancestor language) are also genetically highly similar. However, we also identify nearly 20% mismatches in populations genetically close to linguistically unrelated groups. These mismatches, which occur within the time depth of known linguistic relatedness up to about 10,000 y, are scattered around the world, suggesting that they are a regular outcome in human history. Most mismatches result from populations shifting to the language of a neighboring population that is genetically different because of independent demographic histories. In line with the regularity of such shifts, we find that only half of the language families in GeLaTo are genetically more cohesive than expected under spatial autocorrelations. Moreover, the genetic and linguistic divergence times of population pairs match only rarely, with Indo-European standing out as the family with most matches in our sample. Together, our database and findings pave the way for systematically disentangling demographic and cultural history and for quantifying processes of shifts in language and social identities on a global scale.

Geography and language divergence: The case of Andic languages.

We study the correlation between phylogenetic and geographic distances for the languages of the Andic branch of the East Caucasian (Nakh-Daghestanian) language family. For several alternative phylogenies, we find that geographic distances correlate with linguistic divergence. Notably, qualitative classifications show a better fit with geography than cognacy-based phylogenies. We interpret this result as follows: The better fit may be due to implicit geographic bias in qualitative classifications. We conclude that approaches to classification other than those based on cognacy run a risk to implicitly include geography and geography-related factors as one basis of genealogical classifications.

Internal borders as a source of linguistic divergence: A multi-method dialectometric approach

AbstractFollowing the realization that the north-western dialect continuum of Catalan is splitting along the political border between Catalonia and Aragon, in Spain, this article upholds the view that internal borders should be incorporated into border studies, since they often trigger processes of linguistic convergence and divergence which alter the most common patterns of linguistic diffusion. The language change is analysed in apparent time using a combination of dialectometric techniques that constitute an innovation within the field of border effects, and which, in the specific case of Catalan in Aragon, illustrates the usefulness of dialectometry in detecting processes of structural hybridization in areas where the vitality of the language is most seriously undermined. Lastly, this article evinces the need to further develop a form of social dialectometry that not only answers sociolinguistic questions, but also makes it possible to objectively evaluate the social motivations fuelling the ongoing changes.

БАГАТОПЛАНОВІСТЬ МЕТОДУ МІЖМОВНОГО ПОРІВНЯЛЬНОГО АНАЛІЗУ СПОРІДНЕНИХ /НЕ СПОРІДНЕНИХ МОВ

In the era of globalization and the expansion of language contacts, the interest of linguists in typological studies of related and unrelated languages is growing, which allows to reveal and clarify the national picture of the world in any language. In the field of comparative research, linguistics of the 21st century is characterized by the differentiation of the directions. When conducting a comparative analysis of languages, scientists use the following basic methods that have become traditional: comparative-historical, comparative, typological, contrastive. Recently, the latest research methods have been added to them, thanks to which the comparison of languages turns into a deeper, brighter and multifaceted one. First of all, it concerns areal typology and taxonomic typology. Comparative-historical linguistics studies genetically related languages in a diachronic aspect. In the 19th century, this direction is associated with the names of F. Bopp, J. Grimm, R. Raskov, A. Meillet, and F. Dietz. The goal of research in comparative-historical linguistics is the reconstruction of ancient platforms common to all related languages. In this direction, the indisputable achievement of the Romanistic school of F. Dietz is the discovery of Romano-Latin archetypes. The kinship of the languages of the world is established according to the main feature of their common origin, which makes it possible to classify languages into families/subfamilies, branches, groups and directly into languages. At the same time, accidental coincidences and lexical borrowings are not taken into account. A language family is a basic language structure, according to which closely related and distantly related languages are defined. Languages that make up one language family have common features, are the result of one language that historically preceded them, and belong to the group of related languages. This gives rise to the concept of the genealogical tree of languages and the concept of linguistic divergence. Related languages are considered variants of one continuous language tradition, different in time and space. An example is the Indo-European family of languages that share a common language, or proto-language (Indo-European). Within related languages, subgroups are distinguished, which include languageы that are closest in origin (for example, Spanish and Italian languages). In turn, languages that belong to different groups of the same family are distantly related (eg, Ukrainian and Spanish). The group of unrelated languages consists of languages that originate from different protolanguages and belong to different language families. Linguistic, or comparative, typology arose within the framework of comparative-typological linguistics and is associated with the names of A. Schlegel, A. Schleicher, V. Humboldt. Thanks to the research of representatives of the school of linguistic typology, the question of the type of language was first raised and resolved.

Foundations of the Age-Area Hypothesis

A useful tool in understanding the roots of the world geography of culture is the Age-Area-Hypothesis. The Age-Area Hypothesis (AAH) asserts that the point of geographical origin of a group of related cultures is most likely where the culture speaking the most divergent language is located. In spite of its widespread, multidisciplinary application, the hypothesis remains imprecisely stated, and has no theoretical underpinnings. This paper describes a model of the AAH based on an economic theory of mass migrations. The theory leads to a family of measures of cultural divergence, which can be referred to as Dyen divergence measures. One measure is used to develop an Age-Area Theorem, which links linguistic divergence and likelihood of geographical origin. The theory allows for computation of the likelihood different locations are origin points for a group of related cultures, and can be applied recursively to yield probabilities of different historical migratory paths. The theory yields an Occam’s-razor-like result: migratory paths that are the simplest are also the most likely; a key principle of the AAH. The paper concludes with an application to the geographical origins of the peoples speaking Semitic languages.

Geographical and social isolation drive the evolution of Austronesian languages.

The origins of linguistic diversity remain controversial. Studies disagree on whether group features such as population size or social structure accelerate or decelerate linguistic differentiation. While some analyses of between-group factors highlight the role of geographical isolation and reduced linguistic exchange in differentiation, others suggest that linguistic divergence is driven primarily by warfare among neighbouring groups and the use of language as marker of group identity. Here we provide the first integrated test of the effects of five historical sociodemographic and geographic variables on three measures of linguistic diversification among 50 Austronesian languages: rates of word gain, loss and overall lexical turnover. We control for their shared evolutionary histories through a time-calibrated phylogenetic sister-pairs approach. Results show that languages spoken in larger communities create new words at a faster pace. Within-group conflict promotes linguistic differentiation by increasing word loss, while warfare hinders linguistic differentiation by decreasing both rates of word gain and loss. Finally, we show that geographical isolation is a strong driver of lexical evolution mainly due to a considerable drift-driven acceleration in rates of word loss. We conclude that the motor of extreme linguistic diversity in Austronesia may have been the dispersal of populations across relatively isolated islands, favouring strong cultural ties amongst societies instead of warfare and cultural group marking.

Co-Construction of Shared Understandings Under Uncertainty: Computational Linguistic Approaches

Stakeholders with different values and perspectives find it challenging to reach common understanding amongst themselves. Given the nature of pluralistic beliefs among various stakeholders that engage in interactions, the assumption that collective meanings emerge as a linear combination of knowledge by a set of actors is insufficient to understand how social understandings dynamically unfold over time through interactions. As such, the goal of this symposium is to showcase works that shed light on how different stakeholders dynamically co- construct shared meanings under uncertainty. The papers invited to the symposium study a wide range of contexts – entrepreneurship, organizational misconduct, and organizational volatility – under which it is crucial to construct shared meaning under uncertainty. Whereas it has been hard to study the concept due to the difficulty in measuring actual communication contents, the recent methodological advancement in computational linguistic methods enables us to accurately capture the communication contents and discourse patterns that underly the construction of shared meanings. The papers invited to the symposium employ a range of cutting-edge computational linguistic approach to understand the language in relational terms and to expand our understanding of the co- construction of meaning. Constructing New Valuation Metrics: Entrepreneurial Arguments in Nascent Markets Presenter: Derek Harmon; U. of Michigan Presenter: Eunice Yunjin Rhee; Seattle U. Crossing the Line or Creating the Line: Media Effects in the 2009 British MP Expense Scandal Presenter: Timothy Hannigan; U. of Alberta Shaping Community Discourse: Entrepreneurs’ Linguistic Divergence and Online Community Mobilization Presenter: Jamie Seoyeon Song; INSEAD The Negative Association Between Firm Performance Volatility and Norm Consensus Presenter: Matthew Corritore; McGill U. - Desautels Faculty of Management

La singularisation linguistique des Juifs en Provence et en Gascogne : deux cas parallèles ou opposés ?

This article deals with the varieties of French spoken down to our own day by the descendants of the two historic Jewish populations established in Southern France. The first of these two populations was located in Southeastern France and comprised Jews of the former Papal State of Avignon and the adjacent territories formerly known as Comtat Venaissin. The second, located in Southwestern France is of more recent vintage, having been founded in the sixteenth century by descendants of fugitives from the Iberian Inquisitions. Today neither of these two groups numbers more than a few dozen individuals. The unique varieties of French, which they use and which have replaced former varieties of Provençal and Gascon, are teetering on the verge of extinction. Hitherto there has been little systematic study of these dialects. But today, realizing their status as endangered languages, we claim that it is urgent to record and chronicle as much of them as possible. Here we provide a description based upon extant written documents and the results of an ongoing in loco investigation. This is followed by a linguistic analysis of the material, taking into account inter alia the phonetics, the phonology and the constructional morphology of the specific vocabulary. This study is then complemented by a sociolinguistic outline of the situations of use of this heretofore almost neglected linguistic material. The conclusions of our study are that, despite the apparent relationship between these two varieties, their patterns of linguistic divergence are deeply differentiated, hence our doubts about the legitimacy of a single and common denomination, i. e. of “Jewish varieties” or “Jewish languages”, for such unrelated linguistic mechanisms.

Never Mind the Buzzwords: Comparing Social Enterprise Policy-Making in the United Kingdom and Australia

Comparative studies of social enterprise have shown that social enterprise exhibits distinctive characteristics across ‘world regions’. This article uses corpus analysis to empirically explore social enterprise policy in the United Kingdom and Australia. We explore convergence in both datasets by looking at semantic structure, comparing each country’s policy corpus against ‘everyday’ language. This allows a comparison of the convergences between the two datasets (policy discourses) compared to a control (everyday language). Although both are reflective of tropes associated with social policy, we also explore linguistic divergence to unpack the different ways that social enterprise is represented in the respective countries. We find a stronger emphasis on work and employment categories in the UK, which aligns with public policy that has linked social enterprise to local and community development. In Australia, market-oriented categories are emphasized. We argue that policy-makers engage with social enterprise in distinctive ways and that like institutional settings do not necessarily lead to like policy outcomes. These findings illustrate why corpus analysis is an important complementary technique for comparative policy analysis as the approach reveals the discursive nuances – or divergences – between countries. Ultimately, this contributes to long-running debates in policy studies scholarship regarding convergence and divergence among regime types.

An Analysis of Conflict between Pashto and Dari Languages of Afghanistan

Since the establishment of Afghanistan State, Dari (dialect of Persian) has remained its dominant and official language. However, in twentieth century, some measures were taken for the development of Pashto language followed by declaration of Pashto as official language in 1936. For the first time a dialect of Persian spoken in Afghanistan was officially renamed as Dari in the 1964 Constitution of Afghanistan. In this constitution as well as in the current constitution of 2004 both of the languages were declared as official languages. Since the emergence of Pashto as official language, a rivalry and linguistic divergence created between the two languages and their respective ethnic groups. As a result of this rivalry an ethnic and linguistic consciousness emerged which led to discussions about language planning policies.
 This research article discovers historical evolution and reasons for this linguistic divergence and its implications on future nation building in Afghanistan. It also explores historical development of status, planning and policies regarding these two languages for better understanding of the linguistic divergence and rivalry. Furthermore, the study proposes options for accommodation of different languages through cultural harmonization and multiculturalism. 

Evolution within a language: environmental differences contribute to divergence of dialect groups

BackgroundThe processes leading to the diversity of over 7000 present-day languages have been the subject of scholarly interest for centuries. Several factors have been suggested to contribute to the spatial segregation of speaker populations and the subsequent linguistic divergence. However, their formal testing and the quantification of their relative roles is still missing. We focussed here on the early stages of the linguistic divergence process, that is, the divergence of dialects, with a special focus on the ecological settings of the speaker populations. We adopted conceptual and statistical approaches from biological microevolution and parallelled intra-lingual variation with genetic variation within a species. We modelled the roles of geographical distance, differences in environmental and cultural conditions and in administrative history on linguistic divergence at two different levels: between municipal dialects (cf. in biology, between individuals) and between dialect groups (cf. in biology, between populations).ResultsWe found that geographical distance and administrative history were important in separating municipal dialects. However, environmental and cultural differences contributed markedly to the divergence of dialect groups. In biology, increase in genetic differences between populations together with environmental differences may suggest genetic differentiation of populations through adaptation to the local environment. However, our interpretation of this result is not that language itself adapts to the environment. Instead, it is based on Homo sapiens being affected by its environment, and its capability to adapt culturally to various environmental conditions. The differences in cultural adaptations arising from environmental heterogeneity could have acted as nonphysical barriers and limited the contacts and communication between groups. As a result, linguistic differentiation may emerge over time in those speaker populations which are, at least partially, separated.ConclusionsGiven that the dialects of isolated speaker populations may eventually evolve into different languages, our result suggests that cultural adaptation to local environment and the associated isolation of speaker populations have contributed to the emergence of the global patterns of linguistic diversity.

A Digital Humanities Approach to Inter-Korean Linguistic Divergence: Stylometric Analysis of ROK and DPRK Journalistic Texts

Linguistic divergence between standard varieties of Korean has been much studied, however, it has largely concerned itself with fine-grained analyses of single points of divergence, for example vocabulary, and the language policy behind such divergence. In contrast, this paper examines general trends of language in use in the ROK and DPRK in a specific genre of writing. We first briefly review prior research on the linguistic divergence which the standard varieties of these countries have undergone to contextualize our argument that a digital humanities approach could provide new insights for the field. This includes taking advantage of internet mediated data collection and quantitative analyses applied to relatively large amounts of data. In order to demonstrate the potential of this approach more fully, we present a small-scale stylometric analysis of ROK and DPRK journalistic texts. This pilot study suggests that national origin determines the stylistic characteristics of these texts to a greater extent than the topic and allows us to tentatively propose general characterizing features of ROK and DPRK journalistic style. We conclude with a prospectus for the incorporation of such methods into the study of ROK/DPRK linguistic divergence.

Stadt, Land, Berg. Vom Zusammenspiel von Dialektwahrnehmung und Topographie

In traditional dialectology, prominent geographical conditions are particularly made responsible for linguistic divergence between neighboring dialect areas (e. g. rivers, mountain ranges, etc.). Also modern national borders, territories of the Middle Ages or even older borders between tribal areas are made responsible as factors which consider linguistic areas as “mirror pictures of history” (Bach 1950: 31, translation: CS). Geographical as well as political borders seem to function as points of orientation that speakers use for constructing their cognitive surroundings and which consequently can result in linguistic divergence. In our contribution, we want to focus on the question of how the topographic nature of land-scapes influences the mental construction of linguistic areas by lay speakers. For pursuing this question, we will discuss results from German dialect areas that cover a broad range of different topographic landscape forms. The analyzed areas are located in the utter southwest of Germany (characterized by flat lands along the Rhine valley and low mountain ranges of the Black Forest) and in South Tyrol in the very north of Italy (characterized by mountains and deep valley cuttings). In our contribution, we will argue that speakers in their subjective dialect perception orient themselves toward national borders and topographically prominent points. With regard to topography primarily valleys are used as eponyms for subjective dialect areas.

Cultures in Dialogue. Institutional and Individual Challenges for EU Institutions and EU Citizens from the Perspective of Legal Linguistics

In the European Union, numerous cultures have entered into dialogue. Currently, there are 23 official languages (EU languages) and therefore 506 possible language combinations for translation. This makes demands on the EU institutions and on EU citizens as well. Linguistic divergence makes legal certainty a rather shaky matter. There are also divergences from the EU linguistic regime regarding the official and the working languages. For reasons of efficiency, the institutions of the Union communicate internally in merely a small number of working languages, for the most part without any basis for this in the Rules of Procedure. The Court of Justice of the European Union traditionally uses French. All documents are translated from the language of the case into the working language. Although the decision, formulated in French, is re-translated into the language of the case, this translated version is classified as the original version and not as a translation. This is of importance for the status of authenticity because the decision only has full legal effect in the language of the case.Traditional language models favour a reduction of the EU languages. Their representatives argue either with regard to the practice of the use of three languages in the EU institutions, or they advocate English as a global language, or they call for neutral languages. In contrast, the European Reference Language Model, which is developed along the lines of legal linguistics, suggests a concept of reference and native languages. It would lead to a reduction in the translation load in Brussels and Luxembourg. But first and foremost, it would be able to improve the linguistic quality of legal documents (e.g., directives, regulations) and therefore also their application to legal practice (e.g. legal certainty, comprehensibility of legal texts). At the same time, the model respects the dignity of each EU Member State in the form of its language.

Identity, emotions and cultural differences in English and Polish online comments

AbstractThe focus of the present paper is to examine the extent to which the language used in Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) and online discourse emotional behavior are good predictors of individual and groupcultural typesand their identities. It is argued that theidentity markingCMC interactants develop has to be stronger, more salient, and, possibly less ambiguous than that used in direct conversation and that theemotionality markersthe users apply in their discussion,particularly those engaging negative emotions and reflecting negative judgments, are argued to be used by online discussants for the purpose of increasing the CMC commentators’conversational visibility. The questions of cultural and linguistic divergence between English and Polish emotional communication patterns are the main points discussed. Three sets of corpus materials are used and the research methodology involves both the qualitative analysis of the emotion types as well as a quantitative (frequency) approach, particularly with respect to culture-specific corpus-generated collocation patterns.

New Evidence from Linguistic Phylogenetics Identifies Limits to Punctuational Change.

Since the early 1970s, biologists have debated whether evolution is punctuated by speciation events with bursts of cladogenetic changes, or whether evolution tends to be of a more gradual, anagenetic nature. A similar discussion among linguists has barely begun, but the present results suggest that there is also room for controversy over this issue in linguistics. The only previous study correlated the number of nodes in linguistic phylogenies with branch lengths and found support for punctuated equilibrium. We replicate this result for branch lengths, but find no support for punctuated equilibrium using a different, automated measure of linguistic divergence and a much larger data set. With the automated measure, segments of trees containing more nodes show no greater divergence from an outgroup than segments containing fewer nodes.