four million posts from members of RateBeer and BeerAdvocate, two online beer communities that have been around for more than a decade. They wanted to know how people’s language use changed the longer they’d been members of the forum. They found that older accounts were likely to stick to older pieces of beer jargon, such as talking about a beer’s “aroma” if they joined in 2003, whereas younger accounts were quicker to adopt newer beer jargon, such as preferring “S” (for “smell”) if they joined in 2005. The study provides an interesting way of teasing apart the effects of age and peer groups, suggesting that people are more open to new vocabulary during the first third of their lifespan, regardless of whether that’s an eighty-year lifespan in an offline community or a three-year “lifespan” in an online one.
What’s unique about adolescence, then, may not be our susceptibility to linguistic trends. Rather, it’s the last time that a whole population is entering a new social group all at once. Adults periodically move to new cities and start new jobs and develop new hobbies, all of which bring us under new linguistic influences. But we don’t all change careers or become parents or join beer-tasting messageboards at exactly the same age, so it’s harder to study linguistic changes that happen later in life. Harder, but not impossible: it also depends on where we want to look. Researchers are part of society, and as a society, we’re more likely to be worried about teen slang than about parents adding new terms to the familect or businesspeople adopting new corporate buzzwords. Perhaps we need to rethink our demographic questions to ask about dates of joining new social groups in addition to date of birth.
Finding networked language patterns on social media isn’t an anomaly: people offline are generally also more similar to their friends than to the rigid, unfeeling demographic boxes of a census-taker. It’s just that we had no practical way of measuring it. Doing a network analysis of people’s friends and interlocutors used to be really hard. Like makes-biking-around-France-for-four-years-look-easy kind of hard. You could start by doing a typical language survey, but that would just be the beginning of your work. You’d also have to get people to manually make a list of all their friends, how long they’ve known them, and how often they talk with each one. Then, you’d have to somehow get ahold of all these friends and also survey them. But that’s just a one-layer network. You’d want to repeat these steps several times so that you could make webs of connections between people. Social scientists have done this kind of research occasionally—there’s a city in Massachusetts called Framingham where researchers have followed a couple thousand people, with their health and social connections, for three generations now—but understandably, they don’t do it very often. Not for daily words produced by tens or hundreds of thousands of people. Even though your Twitter network doesn’t represent absolutely everyone you talk to, even though not everyone is on Twitter, it makes for an intriguing new way of approaching the very old question of how new words catch on.
Analyzing language based on social networks also complicates another traditional demographic check box: gender. The traditional finding for gender is shown in a study by the linguists Terttu Nevalainen and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg at the University of Helsinki, which looked at six thousand personal letters written in English between 1417 and 1681. Personal letters make a great corpus because, like tweets, they don’t go through editorial standardization. Unfortunately, there’s also a lot fewer of them, and they tend to overrepresent the leisured, educated classes. But they’re still the best record we have of what day-to-day English looked like back then. The linguists examined fourteen language changes that occurred during this period, things like the eradication of “ye,” the switch from “mine eyes” to “my eyes,” and the replacement of -th with -s, making words like “hath,” “doth,” and “maketh” into “has,” “does,” and “makes.” (Pretty shocking stuff.) For eleven out of the fourteen changes, Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg found that female letter-writers were changing the way they wrote faster than male letter-writers. In the three exceptional cases where the men were ahead of the women, those particular changes were linked to men’s greater access to education at the time. In other words, women are reliably ahead of the game when it comes to word-of-mouth linguistic changes.
Research in other centuries, languages, and regions continues to find that women