Sociolinguistic research has demonstrated that ‘urban contact dialects’ tend to diffuse beyond the speech communities in which they first emerge. However, no research has attempted to explore the distribution of these varieties across an entire nation nor isolate the social mechanisms that propel their spread. In this paper, we use a corpus of 1.8 billion geo‐tagged tweets to explore the spread of Multicultural London English (MLE) lexis across the United Kingdom. We find evidence for the diffusion of MLE lexis from East and North London into other ethnically and culturally diverse urban centres across England, particularly those in the South (e.g. Luton), but find lower frequencies of MLE lexis in the North of England (e.g. Manchester), and in Scotland and Wales. Concluding, we emphasise the role of demographic similarity in the diffusion of linguistic innovations by demonstrating that this variety originated in London and diffused into other urban areas in England through the social networks of Black and Asian users.

中文翻译：

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利用社交媒体推断城市接触方言的传播：多元文化伦敦英语的案例研究

社会语言学研究表明，“城市接触方言”往往会扩散到它们最初出现的语言社区之外。然而，没有研究试图探索这些品种在整个国家的分布，也没有孤立推动它们传播的社会机制。在本文中，我们使用包含 18 亿条地理标记推文的语料库来探索多元文化伦敦英语 (MLE) 词汇在英国的传播。我们发现 MLE 词汇从东伦敦和北伦敦传播到英格兰其他种族和文化多样化的城市中心的证据，特别是南部的城市中心（例如卢顿），但发现英格兰北部的 MLE 词汇频率较低（例如曼彻斯特） ），以及苏格兰和威尔士。最后，我们通过证明这种多样性起源于伦敦并通过黑人和亚洲用户的社交网络传播到英格兰其他城市地区，强调了人口统计相似性在语言创新传播中的作用。