Language, Place, and Social Media: Geographic Dialect Alignment in New Zealand

TL;DR

This thesis explores how social media communities in New Zealand reflect geographic dialects through language use, combining qualitative insights with computational models to reveal semantic variation and community patterns.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive corpus and computational methods to analyze geographic dialect alignment and semantic shifts in New Zealand social media communities.

Findings

Users associate language with place and form contiguous speech communities.

Semantic variation and shifts are evident across place-based communities.

A large corpus of 4.26 billion words supports future sociolinguistic research.

Abstract

This thesis investigates geographic dialect alignment in place-informed social media communities, focussing on New Zealand-related Reddit communities. By integrating qualitative analyses of user perceptions with computational methods, the study examines how language use reflects place identity and patterns of language variation and change based on user-informed lexical, morphosyntactic, and semantic variables. The findings show that users generally associate language with place, and place-related communities form a contiguous speech community, though alignment between geographic dialect communities and place-related communities remains complex. Advanced language modelling, including static and diachronic Word2Vec language embeddings, revealed semantic variation across place-based communities and meaningful semantic shifts within New Zealand English. The research involved the creation of a corpus containing 4.26 billion unprocessed words, which offers a valuable resource for future study. Overall, the results highlight the potential of social media as a natural laboratory for sociolinguistic inquiry.