Researchers Use Twitter as a Tool to Study Language Evolution
Is Twitter expediting language evolution? Linguistic researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta say yes. Jacob Eisenstein and his colleagues followed 30 million tweets sent from across the United States from December 2009 to May 2011. They found several slang terms spread across regions during the period. For example, “bruh,” an alternative form of “brother,” or “bro” was more commonly tweeted in southeastern cities before appearing in Californian vernacular. Likewise, the emoticon “-_-“ that denotes annoyance was first used in New York and Florida, but is now commonly tweeted both coasts as well as in Arizona and Texas.
The research team used a mathematical model to follow to large-scale flow of new words between cities and found that cities with large African American populations are generally the linguistic innovators. The discovery only reinforced long-held understanding of how African American communities influence American dialect. In the past, words like “cool,” “dig,” and “uptight” have spread from use within African American communities to the greater population.
Eiseinstein is now testing how the use of social media accelerates the evolution of language. Whereas in the old days, the spread of a word relied on a person to travel to a new area and speak it, today’s technology allows neologisms to spread rapidly. The research team hopes to present preliminary findings at a Neural Information Processing Systems Foundation workshop in December.
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