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Regional twang shows up in your tweets: Study
By siliconindia
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Wednesday, 12 January 2011, 22:44 IST
Bangalore: Your tweets can be giving away a lot more than you think. For instance, your regional background. A new study reveals that people tweet in their regional dialects in Twitter.
Researchers from the Carnegie Mellon University have found after going through 3.8 lakh Twitter messages of 9,500 users from a week in March 2010 that the site has messages replete with geographical dialects. For instance, New Yorkers used the word "suttin" instead of "something". Similarly, the research team examined around 4.5 million words and found same results with respect to regional dialects.
A typical Twitter message is 140 characters long. This results in people shortening some words as well to accommodate the thought in those many characters. Like people in New York use "OD" instead of "very".
Jacob Eisenstein from the University's Machine Learning Department said, "Some of what we found really just confirms previous intuitions, but some things were much more specific for social media. One thing I think that it shows is that people really have a need to communicate their identity - their cultural identity and their geographic identity in social media."
The study was presented to the Linguistic Society of America meeting in Pittsburgh.
