Metricizing diaspora dualities: a comparative quantitative analysis of poetry and prose in Southeast Asian Chinese literature

Abstract The intersection of quantitative literary studies and diaspora research presents critical opportunities for examining linguistic divergence between immigrant literatures and their cultural origins. While digital humanities scholarship has increasingly embraced computational methods, systematic applications in comparative diaspora studies—particularly those focusing on Southeast Asian Chinese communities—remain underdeveloped. This study bridges this gap through a corpus-driven analysis of 372 literary works (comprising 240 poems and 132 prose pieces) using natural language processing pipelines, hierarchical clustering, and one-way analysis of variance. The common features we proposed have played a greater role in distinguishing Southeast Asian Chinese diaspora new poetry from Chinese mainland poetry. We found that the new poetry of Southeast Asian Chinese diaspora new poetry is not as natural as that of Chinese Mainland, showing greater freedom and diversity in vocabulary selection. Specifically, the vocabulary usage rate of Southeast Asian diaspora new poetry is relatively high, while the grammar usage rate is low. These computationally derived patterns not only establish measurable criteria for distinguishing diaspora literatures through machine-learning classifiers, but also challenge conventional assumptions about linguistic “naturalness” in cross-cultural contexts. Our methodology, which integrates computational stylistics with diaspora theory, provides a replicable analytical framework for studying literary migration phenomena, thereby advancing both digital humanities methodologies and Southeast Asian literary studies.