Mapping urban places of language diversity with social media and population registry data: dynamic and static perspectives

Keywords: language, urban geography, gis, diversity, social media
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 60

Abstract

Cities are multilingual, and under constant change as global migration flows continue and urbanization rates increase. Language remains an often-overlooked source of diversity in urban geography, although it can offer novel perspectives into phenomena like urban diversity, socio-spatial segregation, and gentrification.

In this presentation, we study the diversity of languages in the Helsinki Metropolitan Area, Finland, using two data sources: official population registry data and geotagged social media data collected from Twitter and Instagram. We measure the diversity of languages using metrics developed in the field of ecology and apply methods from spatial statistics to identify statistically significant clusters of high and low language diversity. Furthermore, we explore the temporal stability of these clusters to study how the diversity of languages varies in time and space.

We find language diversity to be a dynamic phenomenon captured to different degrees by languages in the two data sources. The diversity of languages as seen from social media has largely dissimilar spatial patterns to that of registry data, illustrating how these data complement each other. Temporal stability of high and low language diversity highlight different types of areas.

Languages have much unexplored potential for novel and more fine-grained perspectives to explore urban diversity, but also socio-spatial segregation and gentrification. Understanding how dynamic language diversity plays out spatio-temporally can lead to better urban planning decisions and to more inclusive urban environments.