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:Are those that use twiiter TWITS or TWATS?

[BarbaraHudson]

Yes. Next question?

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:"Neoligism?"

[oodaloop]

Neoligism is a neologism!