Just as a person’s accent is a dead giveaway of his region, the way a user writes on Twitter too can indicate his whereabouts.
Jacob Eisenstein and his colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University's (CMU) School of Computer Science developed an automated method that analyses Twitter word-use and shows that regional dialects appear to be evolving within social media.
They collected d a week's worth of Twitter messages in March 2010, and selected geotagged (added geographical identification to media such as photographs, video, websites, SMS messages or RSS feeds) messages from Twitter users and then made a database of 9,500 users and 380,000 messages.
They found that certain regionalisms are already well known and associated with specific areas of the country, reports Live Science.
For example, a Southerner’s "y'all," a Pittsburghers' "yinz," as well as the usual regional divides in references to soda, pop and Coke.
But other phrasing has evolved with social media itself. For instance, in northern California, something that's cool is "koo" in tweets, while in southern California, it's "coo."
In many cities, something is "sumthin," but tweets in New York City favor "suttin."
New Yorkers are "deadass" tired and Angelenos are simply tired "af," which stands for "as f***."
Although these habits may have cultivated due to the limited 140 characters, Eisenstein geography's influence also is apparent.
The statistical model could predict the location of a tweeter in the continental United States with a median error of about 300 miles.
Here's a list of some commonly used slang on Twitter.
af: as f*** (very) - LA/Southern California
coo: cool - LA/Southern California
fasho: for sure - LA/Southern California
gna: going to - Boston
iono: I don’t know - Northern California
lames: lame people - Lake Erie Region
koo: cool - Northern California
lls: laughing like s*** - Washington D.C
Eisenstein will present the study on January 8 at the Linguistic Society of America annual meeting in Pittsburgh.
