From The Chronicle of Higher Education
Suttin Hella Koo, Y’all: Regional Dialects Thrive on Twitter
By Marc Parry
When people wanted to study language, they used to have two options. They could use a computer to analyze a large body of formal writing, like newspapers. Or they could go out and interview a bunch of people.
Now Twitter offers something fresh for researchers interested in the evolution of language: massive amounts of informal written communication.
Scientists at Carnegie Mellon University are demonstrating the potential of that data in a study, which has found that regional dialects are thriving on Twitter. In fact, local slang seems to be evolving within the social-media site....
Asked for a reaction to the study, Geoffrey Nunberg, an expert on linguistic technologies, sent an e-mail to Wired Campus saying that the research “seems technically and methodologically impressive.”
“But the findings are less than epochal,” says Mr. Nunberg, an adjunct professor at the School of Information at the University of California at Berkeley. ‘Slang may depend on geography more than standard English does’—well, we’ve sort of known that for a while. But I do think that the availability of these huge corpora of tweets and text messages could produce some interesting results in the future.”