Political dogwhistles and community divergence in semantic change

• We test whether the development of political dogwhistles can be observed using language change measures; specifically, does the development of a “hidden” message in a dogwhistle show up as differences in semantic change between communities over time? We take Swedish-language dogwhistles related to the on-going immigration debate and measure differences over time in their rate of semantic change between two Swedish-language community forums, Flashback and Familjeliv, the former representing an in-group for understanding the “hidden” meaning of the dogwhistles. We find that multiple measures are sensitive enough to detect differences over time, in that the meaning changes in Flashback over the relevant time period but not in Familjeliv. We also examine the sensitivity of multiple modeling approaches to semantic change in the matter of community divergence.

Subject headings

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Media and Communications (hsv//eng)

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Jämförande språkvetenskap och allmän lingvistik (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- General Language Studies and Linguistics (hsv//eng)

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Data- och informationsvetenskap -- Språkteknologi (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Computer and Information Sciences -- Language Technology (hsv//eng)

Publication and Content Type

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