With globalization, this has lessened considerably. However, we are seeing different kinds of dialects based on subcultures, and specifically based on political affiliation. You see it in keywords that politicians use, and more obviously in how in-groups talk to each other and about each other. Technology has allowed users to isolate themselves not in place, but in ideology, and this in turn creates its own isolated dialects. It represents an evolution in language. And obviously, location-based dialects still exist, but online, someone from California will be able to speak with a New Yorker of the same political persuasion more seamlessly than either of them will be able to talk to someone who lives next door but has an opposite political view.

This has interesting implications for the translation industry, and particularly for machine translation (MT). It would be difficult to create a tool to automate widespread data collection of dialects that are this specific — and this might matter if you’re trying not to alienate certain audiences.

Computational linguistics can be of limited use with very nuanced semantic studies — natural language processing (NLP) experts worry about MT accuracy. “From an NLP perspective, it’s a matter of semantics, and the challenge is context,” said John Tinsley, managing director of Iconic Translation. “From an MT perspective, the same idea would follow but with a whole additional challenge — whether the same nuance is captured in the target language, or whether this is particular to the US.”

On a certain level, however, computational dialect study is already happening. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University recently analyzed over 86 million YouTube comments to track how people of different political affiliations use different words to refer to the same thing, such as “liberal” verus the derogatory “libtard.” Although the paper considers these words “translatable” pairs, they certainly are not in any traditional sense.

In a different vein, the University of Oxford’s Computational Propaganda (ComProp) project has been tracking the rise of “computational propaganda” since 2012. The project “includes analysis of how tools like social media bots are used to manipulate public opinion,” and estimates that over 40 countries, and counting, have deployed some type of political bot. Russia has used social media very effectively, most notably in the 2016 and 2020 US elections, but it isn’t alone. Digital propaganda has been influencing political opinion from Catalan to the UK. From a linguistic perspective, the use of political NLP bots may actually be shaping how language is evolving — the repetitive, grammatically-poor draconian style of partisan social media discourse is well-suited to chatbots. According to ComProp researchers, Russia-based RT, the best-funded disinformation organization in the world, has a specific goal to cause chaos and in-fighting in other nations. This has extended to the way the org employs specific terms and ideas.

Whatever the causes, in the United States, conservatives and liberals have splintered into factions that speak different languages, in an almost literal sense — and it seems to be a trend that is spilling over into the rest of the world as well. Now more than ever, in perhaps the most tense presidential election the country has ever seen, there are certain words and phrases each political group uses that are foreign to the other. Many so-called “Antifa” posters circulating around the internet in mid-2020 were easily spotted as fake for this reason. One such fake, for example, called for violence, offered free vegan food, used a word considered a slur in leftist circles, and asterisked out most of a curse word (f***).

Perhaps most confusingly, conservatives and liberals sometimes use the same words to mean opposite things. Although they use the same dictionaries — standard US English — the context and subtext of the words are vastly different. Conservatives use words to speak about top-down authoritarianism and duty, and liberals use the same words to talk about individual self-determination.

Consider the word “sovereign,” for example. Conservative Christians often say that “God is sovereign,” and leftists talk about their “sovereign bodies” during meditation retreats. Conservatives tend to see sovereignty as being handed down to the chosen people; liberals talk about sovereignty as belonging to indigenous nations, or to individuals.

Specific word usage reflects other epistemology-level ideas about the world, too. Recently, a debate sprung up on a private individual’s social media page about the meaning of the word “privilege.” One conservative argued that poor white people have no privilege. How could they? They don’t have any of the extras of the upper classes. “Privilege doesn’t mean the lack of oppression,” she said. But to leftists, that’s exactly what it means — the baseline isn’t what’s considered normal, it’s whatever is at the very bottom. Conservatives draw the baseline at more of a social average, and it’s only if you pass that line that they’d use the word “privilege.”

Additionally, words like “antifascist,” “power,” “obedience,” “constitutional” and even “love” are used differently in different circles. “Thug” might be code for “Black guy” or it might — somewhat tongue in cheek — mean “police in riot gear.” “Anarchist” might mean “violent looter” or “person who feeds the homeless,” depending on who you ask.