Identifying a “New” Social Variable: Sociospatial Distance from the Old Order Mennonites
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Mennonites in southern Ontario represent a continuum of religious groups, ranging from the traditional Old Order Mennonites, who reject modern technology and participation in mainstream society, to the most liberal Conference Mennonites, who are socially integrated in mainstream society. Not much is known about Mennonite English, which is acquired as a second language (in traditional groups) or as a first language (in liberal groups). In this study, I present a “new” (to the academic discourse) social variable which I identified during ethnographic fieldwork with the Mennonites: the sociospatial distance from the Old Orders. The variable captures the three dimensions of social mobility, dialect contact, and network density. Based on a case study on Canadian Raising, I illustrate how the variable accounts for the social and linguistic complexities of the individual speakers. The analysis reveals that the traditional Old Order Mennonites and Mennonites who were never affiliated with the Old Order group pattern similarly (and differ from previous documentations of Canadian English), while speakers who left the Old Order church for a more liberal Mennonite denomination produce significantly different vowels (and linguistically approach the mainstream). The findings suggest that these speakers’ internal and external conflicts, grounded in their close contact with both social realities, is reflected in their systematic deviation from Mennonite English. This study contributes to an emerging body of research on the linguistic negotiation of conflicting identities (Levon 2015, Jones 2018, VanderStouwe 2024).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".