Mapping Lexical Dialect Variation in British English Using Twitter

Jack Grieve; Chris Montgomery; Andrea Nini; Akira Murakami; Diansheng Guo

doi:10.3389/frai.2019.00011

Mapping Lexical Dialect Variation in British English Using Twitter

Front Artif Intell. 2019 Jul 12:2:11. doi: 10.3389/frai.2019.00011. eCollection 2019.

Authors

Jack Grieve¹, Chris Montgomery², Andrea Nini³, Akira Murakami¹, Diansheng Guo⁴

Affiliations

¹ Department of English Language and Linguistics, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, United Kingdom.
² School of English, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, United Kingdom.
³ Department of Linguistics and English Language, University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom.
⁴ Department of Geography, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, United States.

Abstract

There is a growing trend in regional dialectology to analyse large corpora of social media data, but it is unclear if the results of these studies can be generalized to language as a whole. To assess the generalizability of Twitter dialect maps, this paper presents the first systematic comparison of regional lexical variation in Twitter corpora and traditional survey data. We compare the regional patterns found in 139 lexical dialect maps based on a 1.8 billion word corpus of geolocated UK Twitter data and the BBC Voices dialect survey. A spatial analysis of these 139 map pairs finds a broad alignment between these two data sources, offering evidence that both approaches to data collection allow for the same basic underlying regional patterns to be identified. We argue that these results license the use of Twitter corpora for general inquiries into regional lexical variation and change.

Keywords: British English; Twitter; big data; dialectology; lexical variation; social media; sociolinguistics; spatial analysis.