Language, Place, and Social Media: Geographic Dialect Alignment in New Zealand
For sociolinguists, this work provides a computational approach to studying dialect alignment in social media, but the findings are largely descriptive and incremental.
This thesis investigates geographic dialect alignment in New Zealand-related Reddit communities, finding that users associate language with place and that place-related communities form a contiguous speech community, though alignment remains complex. Semantic variation across communities and meaningful shifts in New Zealand English were identified using Word2Vec embeddings, with a corpus of 4.26 billion words created.
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.