European Language Ecology and Bilingualism with English on Twitter

The present paper deals with Flemish adolescents' informal computer-mediated communication (CMC) in a large corpus (2.9 million tokens) of chat conversations. We analyze deviations from written standard Dutch and possible correlations with the teenagers' gender, age and educational track. The concept of non-standardness is operationalized by means of a wide range of features that serve different purposes, related to the chatspeak maxims of orality, brevity and expressiveness. It will be demonstrated how the different social variables impact on non-standard writing, and, more importantly, how they interact with each other. While the findings for age and education correspond to our expectations (more non-standard markers are used by younger adolescents and students in practice-oriented educational tracks), the results for gender (no significant difference between girls and boys) do not: they call for a more fine-grained analysis of non-standard writing, in which features relating to different chat principles are examined separately

Immigrant community integration in world cities

As a consequence of the accelerated globalization process, today major cities all over the world are characterized by an increasing multiculturalism. The integration of immigrant communities may be affected by social polarization and spatial segregation. How are these dynamics evolving over time? To what extent the different policies launched to tackle these problems are working? These are critical questions traditionally addressed by studies based on surveys and census data. Such sources are safe to avoid spurious biases, but the data collection becomes an intensive and rather expensive work. Here, we conduct a comprehensive study on immigrant integration in 53 world cities by introducing an innovative approach: an analysis of the spatio-temporal communication patterns of immigrant and local communities based on language detection in Twitter and on novel metrics of spatial integration. We quantify the "Power of Integration" of cities --their capacity to spatially integrate diverse cultures-- and characterize the relations between different cultures when acting as hosts or immigrants.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figures + Appendi

Mapping urban linguistic diversity with social media and population register data

Globalization, urbanization and international mobility have led to increasingly diverse urban populations. Compared to traditional traits for measuring urban diversity, such as ethnicity and country of origin, the role of language remains underexplored in understanding diversity, interactions between different groups and socio-spatial segregation. In this article, we analyse language use in the Helsinki Metropolitan Area by combining individual-level register data, socio-economic grid database, mobile phone and social media data to understand spatio-temporal patterns of linguistic diversity better. We measured linguistic diversity using metrics developed in the fields of ecology and information theory, and performed spatial clustering and regression analyses to explore the spatio-temporal patterns of linguistic diversity. We found spatial and temporal differences between register and social media data, show that linguistic diversity is influenced by the physical and socio-economic environment, and identified areas where different linguistic groups are likely to interact. Our results provide insights for urban planning and understanding urban diversity through linguistic information. As global urbanization, international migration and refugee flows and climate change drive diverse populations into cities, understanding urban diversity and its implications for urban planning and sustainability become increasingly important.Peer reviewe