Networks and identity drive the spatial diffusion of linguistic innovation in urban and rural areas

Abstract

Cultural innovation (e.g., music, beliefs, language) tends to be adopted regionally. The geographic area where innovation is adopted is often attributed to one of two factors: (i) speakers adopting new behaviors that signal their demographic identities (i.e., an identity effect), or (ii) these behaviors spreading through homophilous networks (i.e., a network effect). In this study, we show that network and identity play complementary roles in determining where new language is adopted; thus, modeling the diffusion of lexical innovation requires incorporating both network and identity. We develop an agent-based model of cultural adoption, and validate geographic properties in our simulations against a dataset of innovative words that we identify from a 10% sample of Twitter (e.g., fleeky, birbs, ubering). Using our model, we are able to directly test the roles of network and identity by comparing a model that combines network and identity against simulated network-only and identity-only counterfactuals. We show that both effects influence different mechanisms of diffusion. Specifically, network principally drives spread among urban counties via weak-tie diffusion, while identity plays a disproportionate role in transmission among rural counties via strong-tie diffusion. Diffusion between urban and rural areas, a key component in innovation spreading nationally, requires both network and identity. Our work suggests that models must integrate both factors in order to understand and reproduce the adoption of innovation.