Universidade de Vigo
Universitat de les Illes Balears

Networks on Americanization

October 05, 2022

Prof. Mikko Laitinen, from the University of Eastern Finland, will deliver a guest lecture entitled Networks of Americanization on Friday 21 October at 12:30pm. 

Here follow the connection details and abstract. See you there!

Link: campusremotouvigo.gal/access/public/meeting/563550549
Password: N1Office

Abstract

This presentation focuses on language use in social media and investigates variability of second language use of English in the Nordic region. English accounts for around 30–40 % of all social media data in the region, making it a unique and previously uncharted setting to study variability (Laitinen & Lundberg 2020). The empirical part asks if language users systematically select British English forms or resort to variants found in American English. Of interest is, therefore, the process of Americanization, viz. the gradual change of how English around the world tends to follow contemporary American English norms (Leech et al. 2009: 252–259). Gonçalves et al. observe that American English variants dominate the expanding circle settings, but point out that “in countries where English is not the mother tongue the real problem is the lack of data” (2018: 8). 

I amend this bad data problem by using a more detailed data set, and my empirical material consists of one year of tweets in English and their metadata from the Nordic Tweet Stream (NTS) corpus. This real-time monitor corpus currently contains material from nearly 700,000 user accounts. 

The empirical part focuses on a set of spelling (e.g. British centre vs. American center) and lexico-grammatical variables (e.g. singular or plural agreement with collective nouns). It not only utilizes geotagging properties of Twitter data but amends them with interaction parameters that enable me to look into social settings in which people use language. 

Overall, this presentation suggests methodological improvements for studying second language uses of English through social media.  

 

References: 

Gonçalves, Bruno, Lucía Loureiro-Porto, José Ramasco, David Sánchez. 2018. Mapping the Americanization of English in space and time. PLoS ONE 13(5): e0197741. 

Laitinen, Mikko & Jonas Lundberg. 2020d. ELF, language change and social networks: Evidence from real-time social media data. In Anna Mauranen & Svetlana Vetchinnikova (eds.), Language Change: The Impact of English as a Lingua Franca, 179–204. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  

Leech, Geoffrey, Marianne Hundt, Christian Mair & Nicholas Smith. 2009. Change in Contemporary English: A Grammatical Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

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