Davies (2005) recommends that the weak-tie theory of language change (Milroy & Milroy 1985) should be incorporated into the Community of Practice (CofP) model to aid with the framework's conceptualisation of language innovation and diffusion. Specifically, the weak-tie theory envisions the innovators of linguistic forms as peripheral to a community while early adopters are the community's central members. The findings from numerous studies of offline CofPs have provided support for elements of this hypothesis. However, the only study to explore the applicability of the theory in an online CofP was grounded in an unusual linguistic context (Stewart et al. 2017).

My research addresses this gap in the literature through the exploration of the hypotheses that a) the innovators of linguistic forms will be peripheral members of an online CofP and b) early adopters will be central figures. To investigate these hypotheses, I use a mixed-methods approach to analyse the status of the innovators and early adopters of four community-salient innovative linguistic forms which emerged and diffused through an online music-orientated CofP, Popheads.

Contrary to the first hypothesis, three of the four forms studied were innovated by non-peripheral members who scored highly across multiple markers of status. This departure from previous findings may be related to the fact that linguistic creativity is highly valued in many virtual contexts. Consequently, high-status members may perceive linguistic innovation as desirable behaviour online.

This research also found that identifying the hierarchical structures that underpin a community leads to more precise descriptions of the characteristics of early adopters. Instead of concluding that most early adopters are high-status or central members of the community, it has been possible to reach the more precise conclusion that early adopters are prolific contributors, whose posts are successful at generating discussion, and who are on inbound trajectories in the community. Therefore, to speak of an early-adopter as being 'central' or 'high-status' is, I argue, ultimately too vague and fails to acknowledge the multidimensional nature of status.

References

Davies, Bethan. 2005. Communities of practice: Legitimacy not choice. Journal of Sociolinguistics 9(4). 557–581. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1360-6441.2005.00306.x.

Milroy, James & Lesley Milroy. 1985. Linguistic change, social network and speaker innovation. Journal of Linguistics 21(2). 339–384. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022226700010306.

Stewart, Ian, Stevie Chancellor, Munmun De Choudhury & Jacob Eisenstein. 2017. #anorexia, #anarexia, #anarexyia: Characterizing online community practices. http://arxiv.org/abs/1712.01411.