Friday, January 14, 2011

Twitter is full of regional 'accents'

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.

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