Distinctive linguistic practices help communities build solidarity anddifferentiate themselves from outsiders. In an online community, one suchpractice is variation in orthography, which includes spelling, punctuation, andcapitalization. Using a dataset of over two million Instagram posts, weinvestigate orthographic variation in a community that shares pro-eatingdisorder (pro-ED) content. We find that not only does orthographic variationgrow more frequent over time, it also becomes more profound or deep, withvariants becoming increasingly distant from the original: as, for example,#anarexyia is more distant than #anarexia from the original spelling #anorexia.These changes are driven by newcomers, who adopt the most extreme linguisticpractices as they enter the community. Moreover, this behavior correlates withengagement: the newcomers who adopt deeper orthographic variants tend to remainactive for longer in the community, and the posts that contain deeper variationreceive more positive feedback in the form of "likes." Previous work has linkedcommunity membership change with language change, and our work casts thisconnection in a new light, with newcomers driving an evolving practice, ratherthan adapting to it. We also demonstrate the utility of orthographic variationas a new lens to study sociolinguistic change in online communities,particularly when the change results from an exogenous force such as a contentban.
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