New words are regularly introduced to communities, yet not all of these words persist in a community's lexicon. Among the many factors contributing to lexical change, we focus on the understudied effect of social networks. We conduct a large-scale analysis of over 80k neologisms in 4420 online communities across a decade. Using Poisson regression and survival analysis, our study demonstrates that the community's network structure plays a significant role in lexical change. Apart from overall size, properties including dense connections, the lack of local clusters and more external contacts promote lexical innovation and retention. Unlike offline communities, these topic-based communities do not experience strong lexical levelling despite increased contact but accommodate more niche words. Our work provides support for the sociolinguistic hypothesis that lexical change is partially shaped by the structure of the underlying network but also uncovers findings specific to online communities.

翻译：新词经常向社区介绍,但并不是所有这些词都存在于社区词汇中。在促成词汇变化的许多因素中,我们注重社会网络研究不足的影响。我们用Poisson回归和生存分析方法对4420个在线社区的80多克新龙主义进行了十年的大规模分析。我们的研究显示,社区网络结构在词汇变化中起着重要作用。除了整体规模外,包括密集连接在内的属性、缺乏地方集群和更多的外部联系促进了词汇创新和保留。与离线社区不同,这些基于主题的社区尽管接触增加,但并没有经历强烈的词汇水平的平衡,而是适应了更多的特殊语言词汇。我们的工作为社会语言假设提供了支持,即法律变化部分是由基本网络结构形成的,但也揭示了网上社区特有的发现。