Social ties and local identities influence how language spreads across different regions

Think about the terms you use and why you started using them. Do you describe circular traffic patterns as “roundabouts,” “traffic circles,” or “traffic circles”? Is your favorite drink called “soda,” “soda,” or “coke”? Do you wear “sneakers,” “tennis shoes,” or “athletic shoes”?

Knowing how and why people choose to adopt something new — whether it’s a new language, new ideas, new behaviors or new technology — is key to understanding how culture evolves, according to a new study from the University of Michigan.

Sociologists across many disciplines have been studying this topic for decades and have found several reasons for this. On the one hand, culture is relational: If you’re from Chicago, you might call it sneakers because, growing up, everyone around you called it sneakers. But culture is often also a signal of our identity: A Chicagoan might continue to say sneakers even after moving to the heart of sneaker country, as a subtle way of expressing hometown pride.

Another fact about culture is that it is often adopted regionally. For example, the word “sneakers” is mostly used by people in New England and parts of Florida.

In a study published in Complexity of npjBoth relationships and identity help explain where certain terms are adopted in this country, said the study’s lead author, Aparna Ananthasubramaniam, a UM doctoral student in information and social work.

But what’s interesting is that relationships and identity play different roles in urban and rural areas: words tend to spread between urban areas when people copy their friends. In contrast, words spread between rural areas when people use them to signal a shared identity.

Although language change has been studied for a long time, such studies have only recently become possible. For some time, the main sources of data on language change were observational studies or surveys.

“Thanks to social media, there is an abundance of data showing how people across the country are talking online,” Ananthasubramaniam said.

Ananthasubramaniam and co-authors David Jurgens and Daniel Romero, both associate professors of information, found 76 examples of innovative language that became popular on X: words like birbs, fleeky, Ubering and Demorat.

They mapped the paths these words took as they spread across the United States. They then built a mathematical model of how the language spreads and used it to test whether the spread of these new words was better explained by the relationships or the identity of each user X.

The study does not explain why there are differences between urban and rural areas. The researchers speculate that it may be related to a greater preference for and exposure to diversity in urban areas.