PITTSBURGH | Tweeting about what club "y'all" are going to tonight? Must be from the South. Looking forward to "suttin" special? Then you probably live in New York. Think that new movie was "koo?" Northern California.
The words you write on Twitter can tell people more than just the status of your relationship or how you like the latest Bon Jovi CD. It may just indicate not only how you're living, but where you're living in the U.S.
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University examined 380,000 messages from Twitter during one week in March 2010 and found that the social networking site is full of its own kinds of geographical dialects.
Take the word cool. Southern Californians tend to write the shorthand "coo," while their neighbors up north use the phonetic shorthand "koo."
The 4.5 million words the researchers examined were full of similar examples. Some were obvious — like "y'all" in the South or "yinz" in Pittsburgh — and some more mysterious. The word "suttin" was found over and over in New York City, a shorthand for "something."
Jacob Eisenstein, a post-doctoral fellow of computer science in Carnegie Mellon's Machine Learning Department, and his colleagues were able to analyze the geotags attached to Twitter messages sent from mobile phones for the study. In all, they looked at 4.5 million words.
"Some of what we found really just confirms previous intuitions, but some things were much more specific for social media," said Mr. Eisenstein, noting the phrase "very tired."
Northern Californians tend to substitute "hella" for very, whereas New Yorkers opt for "deadass" tired; those in Los Angeles would be more likely to follow the word tired with the abbreviation "af" — short for "as (expletive.)"
Some of the differences across Twitter can be explained by the need to write concisely to fit the site's 140-character limit. But others, not so much.
While using "u" in place of the two-character longer "you" is pretty common, a lot of New Yorkers do the opposite and lengthen the word to "youu." Or even emphasize "I" by writing two of them — as in "II."
