Mapping the Americanization of English in Space and Time

Abstract

As global political preeminence gradually shifted from the United Kingdom to the United States, so did the capacity to culturally influence the rest of the world. In this work, we analyze how the world-wide varieties of written English are evolving. We study both the spatial and temporal variations of vocabulary and spelling of English using a large corpus of geolocated tweets and the Google Books datasets corresponding to books published in the US and the UK. The advantage of our approach is that we can address both standard written language (Google Books) and the more colloquial forms of microblogging messages (Twitter). We find that American English is the dominant form of English outside the UK and that its influence is felt even within the UK borders. Finally, we analyze how this trend has evolved over time and the impact that some cultural events have had in shaping it.

arXiv comment16 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables. Published version

References in corpus (9)

• Characterizing the Google Books corpus: Strong limits to inferences of socio-cultural and linguistic evolution
• The Twitter of Babel: Mapping World Languages through Microblogging Platforms
• Diffusion of Lexical Change in Social Media
• Languages cool as they expand: Allometric scaling and the decreasing need for new words
• Stochastic model for the vocabulary growth in natural languages
• Crowdsourcing Dialect Characterization through Twitter
• Immigrant community integration in world cities
• Dialectometric analysis of language variation in Twitter
• Touristic site attractiveness seen through Twitter

Cited by in corpus (9)

• Computational Socioeconomics
• The Dynamics of Norm Change in the Cultural Evolution of Language
• American cultural regions mapped through the lexical analysis of social media
• Capturing the diversity of multilingual societies
• English verb regularization in books and tweets
• Hahahahaha, Duuuuude, Yeeessss!: A two-parameter characterization of stretchable words and the dynamics of mistypings and misspellings
• Entropy and type-token ratio in gigaword corpora
• When Dialects Collide: How Socioeconomic Mixing Affects Language Use
• Geolocation differences of language use in urban areas