You say tomato, I say the same: A large-scale study of linguistic accommodation in online communities

Aleksandrs Berdicevskis, Viktor Erbro

Keywords: linguistic accommodation, Swedish, social media, Cosine Delta, convergence, sociolinguistics

TL;DR: The analysis of a very large social-media dataset suggests that the linguistic styles of people who interact become more similar over time

Abstract: An important assumption in sociolinguistics and cognitive psychology is that human beings adjust their language use to their interlocutors. Put simply, the more often people talk (or write) to each other, the more similar their speech becomes. Such accommodation has often been observed in small-scale observational studies and experiments, but large-scale longitudinal studies that systematically test whether the accommodation occurs are scarce. We use data from a very large Swedish online discussion forum to show that linguistic production of the users who write in the same subforum does usually become more similar over time. Moreover, the results suggest that this trend tends to be stronger for those pairs of users who actively interact than for those pairs who do not interact. Our data thus support the accommodation hypothesis.