Probing Sociodemographic Influence on Code-Switching and Language Choice in Quebec with Geolocation of Tweets

The author investigates the influence of the relative size of speech communities on language use in multilingual regions and cities. She notes that due to peoples’ everyday mobility inside a city, it is still unclear whether the size of a population matters for language use on a sub-city scale. By testing the correlation between the size of a population and language use on various spatial scales, the author set out to a better understanding of the extent to which sociodemographic factors influence language use. Her study investigates two particular phenomena that are common to multilingual speakers, namely language mixing or Code-Switching and using multiple languages without mixing. Demographic information from a Canadian census makes predictions about the intensity of Code-Switching and language use by multilinguals in cities of Quebec and neighborhoods of Montreal. Geolocated tweets were used to identify where these linguistic phenomena occurred the most and the least. The author’s results show that the intensity of Code-Switching and the use of English by bilinguals is influenced by the size of Anglophone and Francophone populations on various spatial scales such as the city level, land use level (city center vs. periphery of Montreal), and large urban zones on the sub-city level, namely the western and eastern urban zones of Montreal. However, the correlation between population figures and language use is difficult to measure and evaluate on a much smaller sub-urban scale such as the city block scale due to factors such as population figures missing from the census and people’s mobility. The author found that a qualitative evaluation of language use on a small spatial scale seems to suggest that other social influences such as the location context or topic of discussion are much more important predictors for language use than population figures. She concluded that geographic space can provide information about the relation between language use in multilingual cities and sociodemographic factors such as a speech community’s size and that social media is a valuable alternative data source for sociolinguistic research that offers new insights into the mechanisms of language use such as Code-Switching.

Frontiers in Psychology

Vol. 14

2023

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