Cultural Fault Lines Determine How New Words Spread On Twitter

KentuckyFC writes The global popularity of Twitter allows new words and usages to spread rapidly around the world. And that has raised an interesting question for linguists: is language converging into a global "netspeak" that everyone will end up speaking? Now a new study of linguistic patterns on Twitter gives a definitive answer. By looking at neologisms in geo-located tweets, computational linguists have been able to study exactly how new words spread in time and space. It turns out that some neologisms spread like wildfire while others are used only in areas limited by geography and demography, just like ordinary dialects. For example, the word "ard", a shortened version of "alright" cropped up in Philadelphia several years ago but even now is rarely used elsewhere. The difference in the way new words spread is the result of the geographic and demographic characteristics of the communities in which the words are used. The work shows that the evolution of language on Twitter is governed by the same cultural fault lines as ordinary communication. So we're safe from a global "netspeak" for now.

Comments

Because - technology!

[Livius]

This sounds a lot like people assuming something will be completely different because it's "on the Internet". Twitter language is not like typical written language because its nature is really that of a transcribed form of spoken language, with spoken language style and vocabulary. It's not a totally new form of communication.

Still, I applaud the linguists for going out and measuring it, because people's intuition about language can often be wrong,