# Making "fetch" happen: The influence of social and linguistic context on nonstandard word growth and decline

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.04140 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.04140/

## Key facts

- Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 9 Feb 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Time Waits for No One! Analysis and Challenges of Temporal Misalignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07408/) (2021)
- [Characterizing English Variation across Social Media Communities with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06820/) (2021)
- [The Sociolinguistic Foundations of Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09241/) (2024)
- [A Computational Framework for Slang Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.01826/) (2021)
- [The structure of online social networks modulates the rate of lexical change](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05010/) (2021)
- [Quantifying Cognitive Factors in Lexical Decline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05775/) (2021)
- [Evolving linguistic divergence on polarizing social media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01659/) (2023)
- [Tracing Semantic Variation in Slang](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08635/) (2022)
- [Jointly modelling the evolution of social structure and language in online communities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19243/) (2024)
- [Inducing lexicons of in-group language with socio-temporal context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19257/) (2024)
- [Networks and Identity Drive Geographic Properties of the Diffusion of Linguistic Innovation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.04842/) (2022)
- [The Role of Network and Identity in the Diffusion of Hashtags](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12771/) (2024)
- [Identifying Emerging Concepts in Large Corpora](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.21315/) (2025)
- [From sunblock to softblock: Analyzing the correlates of neology in published writing and on social media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.13123/) (2026)
- [From Utterances to Networks: Modelling Slang Adoption and Diffusion Across Subreddits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.25669/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In an online community, new words come and go: today's "haha" may be replaced by tomorrow's "lol." Changes in online writing are usually studied as a social process, with innovations diffusing through a network of individuals in a speech community. But unlike other types of innovation, language change is shaped and constrained by the system in which it takes part. To investigate the links between social and structural factors in language change, we undertake a large-scale analysis of nonstandard word growth in the online community Reddit. We find that dissemination across many linguistic contexts is a sign of growth: words that appear in more linguistic contexts grow faster and survive longer. We also find that social dissemination likely plays a less important role in explaining word growth and decline than previously hypothesized.