Aye or naw, whit dae ye hink? Scottish independence and linguistic identity on social media

Stephen Richard — Fri, 24 Sep 2021 09:52:36 +0000

Primary Author or Creator

Philippa Shoemark

Stephen Richard Fri, 09/24/2021 - 10:52

Additional Author(s) / Creators

Debnil Sur, Luke Shrimpt, Iain Murray, Sharon Goldwater, University of Edinburgh, Stanford University

Alternative Published Date

2017

Category

Language

Media

Type of Resource

Academic Paper

Length (Pages, words, minutes etc...)

10pp

Fast Facts

The results suggest that although Yes users generally express a stronger Scottish linguistic identity than No users, they are not choosing to express this identity strongly in political discourse aimed at a broad audience.

More details

Political surveys have indicated a relationship between a sense of Scottish identity and voting decisions in the 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum. Identity is often reflected in language use, suggesting the intuitive hypothesis that individuals who support Scottish independence are more likely to use distinctively Scottish words than those who oppose it. In the first large-scale study of sociolinguistic variation on social media in the UK, we identify distinctively Scottish terms in a data-driven way, and find that these terms are indeed used at a higher rate by users of pro-independence hashtags than by users of anti-independence hashtags. However, we also find that in general people are less likely to use distinctively Scottish words in tweets with referendum-related hashtags than in their general Twitter activity. We attribute this difference to style-shifting relative to audience, aligning with previous work showing that Twitter users tend to use fewer local variants when addressing a broader audience.

Resource Address (URL)

https://aclanthology.org/E17-1116.pdf

Keywords

Language

Scots Language

Language English