Vowel elision in Swahili tweets: Linguistic innovation in digital discourse

Domain:

natural language processing

Record type:

datasetpaper

Creator:

Sum

Publisher:

SOA

Host:

This paper analyses vowel elision in a corpus of 11,000 Swahili tweets collected between 2013 and 2023. As a language with an open syllable structure, Swahili typically resists consonant-final forms, making vowel elision particularly striking. Yet on digital platforms, such deviations are increasingly visible and socially meaningful. Drawing on both quantitative corpus analysis and qualitative interviews, this paper explores how and why Swahili speakers online elide vowels, and what these practices reveal about identity, informality, and stylistic innovation in digital communication. The study highlights key geographic and linguistic trends in vowel elision, identifies which vowels and positions are most affected, and considers how social media usage is reshaping orthographic conventions in Swahili.

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Languages

Swahili

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