Mufwene's ecological model locates language evolution in competition among variants contributed by individual idiolects and in speakers' selection from linguistic material made available through interaction. Large language models (LLMs) complicate this architecture without requiring the locus of selection to move away from human speakers. This article argues that LLMs are best treated as distributional mediators: they aggregate language produced across human populations, transform its distribution through training and post-training, and redistribute model-specific outputs at scale. I call the resulting ecological process algorithmic reweighting of the speaker-accessible distribution: model mediation can alter the relative frequencies with which competing variants reach human selectors. Emerging evidence on model-specific linguistic profiles and lexical uptake is consistent with parts of this pathway, but does not establish inevitable convergence. Human social evaluation remains decisive: model-associated forms may diffuse and become conventionalized, become socially recognizable as 'AI-like' and subsequently avoided, or fail to diffuse in the first place. The proposal extends Mufwene's feature-pool ecology one step upstream of speaker selection and yields testable predictions about uptake, model-version effects, convergence, and social reversal.
The rapid growth of large language models (LLMs) has resurrected age-old questions in sociolinguistics and world Englishes, such as who decides what counts as legitimate English, whose English is suspect etc. This paper examines how AI systems, their uses and discourse on them reflect, reinforce, and occasionally challenge (standard) language ideologies, which privilege Inner Circle norms and marginalize non-dominant Englishes. Drawing on evidence from empirical studies, media commentary, social media debates, and examples from AI outputs, the paper shows that AI technologies reproduce dominant language ideologies at different levels: training data, design protocols, evaluation benchmarks, user feedback and public commentary. The analysis uses the public controversy over AI-sounding language, especially the fixation on the word delve, to illustrate how speakers of English from the Global North police the English language norms of Global South English users. The paper also identifies what Christian Mair has called a "standardisation paradox": AI may homogenize English by privileging standard forms and at the same time pluralize Englishes through exposure to wide-ranging corpora and annotation work carried out by Global South users. In doing so, the paper argues that generative AI is reigniting long-standing debates in World Englishes about standardization, legitimacy, and the ownership of English, now playing out in algorithmic systems, model training, evaluation practices, and public discourse, where non-dominant Englishes are increasingly conflated with AI-generated speech. Discussing AI systems as a site where language ideologies are (re)produced, the paper argues for more inclusive design approaches that recognize the plurality of Englishes in order to address the real-world negative consequences of treating some as more legitimate than others.
Slang is a central component of everyday language, reflecting linguistic creativity, social identity, and cultural change, yet its dy- namic and non-standard nature makes it difficult to model computationally. We present the first large-scale computational study of slang.gr, a crowdsourced lexicon of Greek non-standard language, combining lexical content, user-generated tags, and interaction data. To enable the systematic analysis, we map noisy folksonomic tags to a structured multi-layer taxonomy capturing both semantic categories and sociolinguistic metadata. Using this representation, we analyze the linguistic structure of Greek slang and the behavior of its contributor community. We find that slang is strongly centered on person-related and evaluative language, exhibits high morphological creativity, and is shaped by highly skewed participation with short user lifespans and overlapping communities. Building on these signals, we introduce a community-based confidence score for definitions that integrates user roles, interaction patterns, and moderation signals. Our results show that taxonomy-based representations improve interpretability while retaining meaningful aspects of behavioral structure, enabling a more structured and interpretable analysis of confidence signals. Overall, this work establishes slang.gr as a computational resource for non-standard Greek and provides a foundation for sociolinguistic NLP, bias analysis, and the study of informal language in LLMs.
Ivan Porupski, Branimir Dropuljić, Nikola Ljubešićcs.CL stat.AP
Filled pauses (FPs) are a universal feature of spontaneous speech, yet most studies rely on small, single-language corpora, limiting the generalisability of their findings. We analyse ~4,000 hours of parliamentary speech across four related Slavic languages (Croatian, Czech, Polish, Serbian). FP occurrence is obtained via transformer-based automatic detection, while FP rate is modelled using Generalised Estimating Equations (GEE) with Mundlak correction to distinguish within- from between- speaker effects. We replicate a negative association of age and speech rate with FP rate, but find that gender effects are language-specific and directionally opposite to most prior literature. Novel analyses of sentiment, political orientation, and power status reveal a consistent positive association between sentiment and FP rate, alongside parliament-specific modulation by orientation and power status, with opposition speakers tending toward lower FP rates than governing coalition speakers.
Dialect resources occupy a unique position at the intersection of scientific description, cultural preservation, and computational infrastructure. Large language models offer powerful capabilities for accelerating dialect resource development through retrieval-grounded drafting, corpus navigation, metadata enrichment, and annotation workflow support. However, the same systems pose substantial risks: they can contribute to dialect erasure by privileging prestige varieties, homogenizing orthography, and enabling synthetic feedback loops that reduce linguistic diversity over time. These risks are particularly acute for language varieties characterized by diglossia, limited written standardization, or marginalized speaker communities. This paper makes three contributions. First, we integrate insights from variationist sociolinguistics and corpus linguistics to formalize the generator-eraser paradox as a theoretical framework for understanding the dual nature of LLM-assisted dialect work. Second, we derive 12 community guidelines that operationalize this framework into implementable design requirements for dialect resource creation and documentation. Third, we provide an in-depth case study of Arabic dialects, including a structured comparison of widely used resources, to demonstrate how these guidelines address language-specific challenges including diglossia, orthographic variability, and community governance. The contribution is conceptual and operational rather than experimental, with the goal of enabling dialect communities and resource builders across languages to adopt LLMs without sacrificing authenticity, variation, or sovereignty.