Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

by Gretchen McCulloch

Twitter research is especially fruitful because about 1 to 2 percent of people who post on Twitter tag their tweets with their exact geographic coordinates. A reasonably competent data miner can therefore code up a county-level map of where Americans tweet “pop” versus “soda,” where they switch from “y’all” to “you guys,” or which states prefer which swear words—all in less time than it took Edmond Edmont to bike from Paris to Marseille. As a simple proof of concept, let’s look at the work of the linguist Jacob Eisenstein, who found that geo-tagged tweets containing “hella” (as in “That movie was hella long”) are most likely to occur in Northern California, while those containing “yinz” (as in “I’ll see yinz later”) are clustered around Pittsburgh. Both of these findings are consistent with previous linguistic research done in the labor-intensive interview style. Other features he found on Twitter probably wouldn’t have shown up in an interview: a later study by Eisenstein and colleagues found that the abbreviation “ikr” (“I know, right?”) was especially popular in Detroit, the emoticon ^_^ (happy) was characteristic of Southern California, and the spelling “suttin” (“something”) was popular in New York City.