Size Matters: Digital Social Networks and Language Change

Social networks play a role in language variation and change, and the social network theory has offered a powerful tool in modeling innovation diffusion. Networks are characterized by ties of varying strength which influence how novel information is accessed. It is widely held that weak-ties promote change, whereas strong ties lead to norm-enforcing communities that resist change. However, the model is primarily suited to investigate small ego networks, and its predictive power remains to be tested in large digital networks of mobile individuals. This article revisits the social network model in sociolinguistics and investigates network size as a crucial component in the theory. We specifically concentrate on whether the distinction between weak and strong ties levels in large networks over 100 nodes. The article presents two computational methods that can handle large and messy social media data and render them usable for analyzing networks, thus expanding the empirical and methodological basis from small-scale ethnographic observations. The first method aims to uncover broad quantitative patterns in data and utilizes a cohort-based approach to network size. The second is an algorithm-based approach that uses mutual interaction parameters on Twitter. Our results gained from both methods suggest that network size plays a role, and that the distinction between weak ties and slightly stronger ties levels out once the network size grows beyond roughly 120 nodes. This finding is closely similar to the findings in other fields of the study of social networks and calls for new research avenues in computational sociolinguistics.