# Do Large Language Models Adapt to Language Variation across Socioeconomic Status?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.11939 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.11939/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 79 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Feb 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06180/) (2023)
- [FActScore: Fine-grained Atomic Evaluation of Factual Precision in Long Form Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14251/) (2023)
- [Out of One, Many: Using Language Models to Simulate Human Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06899/) (2022)
- [Quantifying the Carbon Emissions of Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.09700/) (2019)
- [Using Large Language Models to Simulate Multiple Humans and Replicate Human Subject Studies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.10264/) (2022)
- [Co-Writing with Opinionated Language Models Affects Users' Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00560/) (2023)
- [Factuality of Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02420/) (2024)
- [Contrasting Linguistic Patterns in Human and LLM-Generated News Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09067/) (2023)
- [Do LLMs write like humans? Variation in grammatical and rhetorical styles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16107/) (2024)
- [Anatomy of an AI-powered malicious social botnet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16336/) (2023)
- [The AI Gap: How Socioeconomic Status Affects Language Technology Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12158/) (2025)
- [Classist Tools: Social Class Correlates with Performance in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04445/) (2024)
- [Characterizing the Language of Online Communities and its Relation to Community Reception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04779/) (2016)
- [The Readability of Tweets and their Geographic Correlation with Education](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1401.6058/) (2014)
- [You Write Like You Eat: Stylistic variation as a predictor of social stratification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.07265/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Humans adjust their linguistic style to the audience they are addressing. However, the extent to which LLMs adapt to different social contexts is largely unknown. As these models increasingly mediate human-to-human communication, their failure to adapt to diverse styles can perpetuate stereotypes and marginalize communities whose linguistic norms are less closely mirrored by the models, thereby reinforcing social stratification. We study the extent to which LLMs integrate into social media communication across different socioeconomic status (SES) communities. We collect a novel dataset from Reddit and YouTube, stratified by SES. We prompt four LLMs with incomplete text from that corpus and compare the LLM-generated completions to the originals along 94 sociolinguistic metrics, including syntactic, rhetorical, and lexical features. LLMs modulate their style with respect to SES to only a minor extent, often resulting in approximation or caricature, and tend to emulate the style of upper SES more effectively. Our findings (1) show how LLMs risk amplifying linguistic hierarchies and (2) call into question their validity for agent-based social simulation, survey experiments, and any research relying on language style as a social signal.