IFISC Seminar on Wednesday May 10, 2023 at 14:30 Place: IFISC Seminar Room Title: Diversity in and of languages: how we can measure and model its emergence to unveil underlying social drivers Speaker: Thomas Louf, IFISC Abstract: <p>Many are the ways in which human language varies and the social variables that give rise<br /> to these variations. The work I will present here shows how simple models can help build<br /> a good basis for understanding of these social mechanisms, and how online corpora from<br /> social media can be of great value to direct this modelling endeavour.<br /> <br /> We will first take a bird's-eye view to uncover the spatial arrangements of language<br /> groups in multilingual countries. We will show how bilingualism can not only belong to a<br /> transition period leading to language extinction, but also remain a stable state keeping<br /> alive a favoured minority language.<br /> <br /> We will then zoom in on English in the UK specifically, and gauge the existence of a<br /> link between the socio-economic background of individuals and their tendency to deviate<br /> from the standard form of their language. Our empirical results provide a more nuanced<br /> picture, also reflected in a model, that shows that social mixing plays a crucial role.</p> <p>Zoom link: https://zoom.us/j/98286706234?pwd=bm1JUFVYcTJkaVl1VU55L0FiWDRIUT09</p>; Url event:https://ifisc.uib-csic.es/en/events/seminars/diversity-in-and-of-languages-h...