Distinctive linguistic practices help communities build solidarity and differentiate themselves from outsiders. In an online community, one such practice is variation in orthography, which includes spelling, punctuation, and capitalization. Using a dataset of over two million Instagram posts, we investigate orthographic variation in a community that shares pro-eating disorder (pro-ED) content. We find that not only does orthographic variation grow more frequent over time, it also becomes more profound or deep, with variants 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 linguistic practices as they enter the community. Moreover, this behavior correlates with engagement: the newcomers who adopt deeper orthographic variants tend to remain active for longer in the community, and the posts that contain deeper variation receive more positive feedback in the form of "likes." Previous work has linked community membership change with language change, and our work casts this connection in a new light, with newcomers driving an evolving practice, rather than adapting to it. We also demonstrate the utility of orthographic variation as a new lens to study sociolinguistic change in online communities, particularly when the change results from an exogenous force such as a content ban.

研究社群內語言的變化，使用超過兩百萬則Instagram貼文的數據，發現新進成員會採用深度正字法，並且隨著時間越來越深，與原本的拼法差異也越大，這種變化是由新進成員帶動的，深度正字法也會帶來較高的點閱率，提高社群成員的參與度與活躍度。

使用正字与变形文字特征化在线社区实践中的厌食症话题