Modeling Cultural and Subcultural Variation in Code-Switched Discourse with Topic Annotation
Year: 2026
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: Code-switching is often modeled in NLP as a structural or token-level phenomenon, overlooking its role as a discourse practice shaped by social and cultural context.In this work, we propose topic-based annotation as a framework for analyzing cultural and subcultural variation in bilingual discourse.Using large language models, we annotate 3,691 codeswitched sentences from Spanish-English (Miami) and Spanish-Guaraní (Paraguay) corpora with topic and discourse-level information, integrating sociolinguistic metadata.Our analysis reveals systematic relationships between discourse topics, language choice, and social variables such as gender and language dominance.We observe subcultural variation within the Miami community and a clear diglossic distribution in Paraguay, where Guaraní is associated with formal domains and Spanish with informal communication.These findings suggest that modeling code-switching through discourselevel categories provides a more complete representation of multilingual communication and enables both cross-cultural and intra-cultural comparison at scale 1 .
Institution: Arizona State University
Language: English
Subfield: Linguistics and Language
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W7166814707