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,

Re:Because - technology!

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The idea that things would be fundamentally different because the internet was always rather silly(if any technology can claim to have fundamentally changed language it would probably be writing; but aside from that pickings are somewhat slim); but some less extreme variants are more plausible: the internet certainly has changed who it is cheap and easy to speak to relatively frequently, though not as much as either its biggest friends or its biggest detractors may have expected.

Re:Because - technology!

[AchilleTalon]

The article doesn't refer to anything fundamentally different. This is a silly idea anyway in the language area. All known languages did evolve from other languages. Nothing is fundamental here and everything is relative and related to you environment and immediate neighbour, his power over you and his influence. The internet has changed many things here since the notion of immediate neighbour no longer hold. Surely the internet is having an influence on the languages and their evolution. I may not appear so important from people who are members of the dominant language group.

A more serious limiting factor with Twitter is the 140 characters limit. This prevent, AMHO, the evolution toward a complete language with its own grammatical rules and words. It forces the appartition of shortcuts or shorts versions of words, abreviations or entire sentences self-contained within a word like orthograph, but this can work only if you can map to a real, existing and widespreaded language.

Re:Because - technology!

[Geoffrey.landis]

The idea that things would be fundamentally different because the internet was always rather silly

Well, it's not that language is changing because of the internet (although it is). It's that language changes can be tracked and dated and the spread of new words mapped because of the internet.

As for the internet fundamentally spreading new words just because the internet-- doesn't seem to be working. I've been spreading the word "photosnark" to refer to those pictures with a snarky comment photoshopped onto them (often pictures of Willy Wonka, or Batman. Sometimes Picard doing a facepalm.). But so far the word hasn't seemed to spread. (People are calling them "memes" sometimes. Completely inaccurately.) Inernets, do your magic!

Re:Are those that use twiiter TWITS or TWATS?

[BarbaraHudson]

Yes. Next question?

Re:"New" words

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

You do realize that the coinage of new words(indeed, more than a few new languages) predates whatever goofy persecution complex you've worked yourself into by millenia, right?

"Neoligism?"

[Anonymous Coward]

What exactly is a "neoligism" ? Is it the illiterate new way of spelling "neologism"...?

Re:"Neoligism?"

[oodaloop]

Neoligism is a neologism!

Re:Self fulfilling predictions

[ArcadeMan]

Get back to working on cancers.

Don't you think we already have enough of those? Shouldn't they be working on treatments and cures instead?

Re:who the fuck cares

[ArcadeMan]

All the Twitters in the world care, buddy.

Huh, what?

[Kjella]

You don't undo centuries and millenniums of cultural and linguistic separation in a day, that a few expressions buck the trend and never go beyond a small region doesn't change the overall trend that the world is trending towards speaking the same languages and towards more and more global cultural impressions. We've observed this both on a micro level (build a bridge to an island, the dialect normalizes) and macro level with marginal languages dying (or preserved like in a museum) and while there's still parts of the world struggling to get fluent in their first language there's a massive alignment of secondary language primarily towards English.

Besides, why should we think everybody wants to talk and write exactly the same? Ever since we got newspapers, radio, telegraph and telephone we could have worked to merge US and UK English back together again, but my impression is neither wants to give up their pronunciation, spelling and idioms and the Internet isn't going to change that. And I think it would be rather boring if we had one pan-global culture anyway, it's watering down how exotic it is if they eat McDonalds and listen to Justin Bieber too. It's nice to be able to be understood though, it's not that fun not knowing how to ask where the nearest toilet is.

Re:Huh, what?

[Marginal Coward]

Ever since we got newspapers, radio, telegraph and telephone we could have worked to merge US and UK English back together again, but my impression is neither wants to give up their pronunciation, spelling and idioms and the Internet isn't going to change that.

Don't you mean 'idioums'?

Actually, it's hard to give up such geographic language differences even within a single country. My favorite example is 'pop' or 'soda' or 'coke'. I went to a university in Missouri which has a population of students from a mix of both the Kansas City and St. Louis areas, though more from the latter. Notice from the map that 'pop' and 'soda' divides somewhere down the middle of Missouri. You'd hear both there. In fact, some of the St. Louis folks even even had their own special name for pop/soda/coke: they called it 'sodah'. Go figure.

rofflocacklylulzosaurusmeisterzomgtldr ard.

[nnet]

insert dollarabbreviation here.

Re:Did they look at 'lol'?

[hey!]

I was in the supermarket just today and at the deli "grab and go" there were packages of cheese slices labelled "LOL American Cheese".

My immediate reaction was "I don't get it."

Re:Did they look at 'lol'?

[Richy_T]

The LOL is that "American cheese" is not real cheese but something scraped out of a chemical silo.

Obligatory xkcd

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck computational linguists!

Twits?

[Jack Griffin]

I know it's seems to work a treat for wannabe B grade celebs and their groupies, but does anyone with a brain actually use Twitter?

Re:Did they look at 'lol'?

[Bite The Pillow]

Lol was my first thought. Many older generation users seem to think it is lots of love, and use it inappropriately. The example is common enough that it is likely not copycat humor.

A generational divide that makes lol intuitive in different ways certainly would be the kind of cultural gap studied, though this was more geographical.

How information spreads is still not well understand, at least not to having a predictive model. Once we do, expect advertising and politics to be painful. That's the down side to knowing these things

Re:Did they look at 'lol'?

[blue trane]

I think any divides found are more an artifact of twitter and the phrases examined, than some inherent limit of the internet.

I think individuals are free to adopt or not adopt neologisms as they see fit, without regard to their language or geographical location. I think users of this site, for instance, can propogate memes such as "In Soviet Russia" jokes without thought to the location they're typing from.

Re:Did they look at 'lol'?

[Bite The Pillow]

What you think is not really important.

If I spend a lot of time interacting with people in my geographic area, or in my age group, or in some other well defined group, people will take on my speech patterns or refuse to depending on things like familiarity with me, or identification with how much they accept or reject existing norms.

Ebonics, for example, is the kind of thing I would expect if a closed society (black folk) communicated with itself via rejection of white folk speech. A third cousin talking with someone in another state might spread some thing new, and people pick that up.

If you think that it's an artifact of twitter, then you have studied the least informative articles published on this type of thing.

Individuals are free. But according to people who study these things, geography is important. Yes, we can propagate things. But I have never heard "ard" - I have heard "aiit" and "right" and "ite", and I have relatives in the studied geography.

People pick things up from the people they communicate most frequently with, and especially with K-12 students, this is constrained geographically. As in my example, parents frequently interact with their children, and sometimes adopt (correctly or not), their language.

Think again. And this time, have something behind what you are saying other than your opinion.

Re:Did they look at 'lol'?

[Richy_T]

Hah, clever. You used fancy language pedantry to totally fail to address my point.