Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Study says how you tweet reveals your origin

It is quite easier to tell where a person comes from the moment he opens his mouth to speak than to read his tweets or text messages.
Tweeting is sending short messages that allows a maximum of 140 letters. By having a limit, twiterrers are naturally forced to abbreviate the words.
It is not uncommon to use the number 4 for the word "for," or shorten "Tnx" for "Thanks."
An interesting study done in March last year among 9,500 Twitter users in the US who sent 380,000 tweets showed their regional dialects based on how they spelled words.
The research team who conducted the study are from the Carnegie Mellon University who will present their results to the Linguistic Society of America meeting in Pittsburgh on Tuesday.
According to the researchers who conducted the study, "Written communication often is less reflective of regional influences because writing, even in blogs, tends to be formal, and thus homogenized."
For example the word "something" is spelled "suttin" by Yankees and "sumthin" for no Yankees.
Southern Californians might tweet "coo" for the "long word" "cool" while their northern counterparts were more likely to tweet "koo."
These interesting findings may predict the location of the users in the United States, the study finds.
So, when someone tells you "OD" for "very" he is more likely a New Yorker while "hella" if they are northern Californians.
And lastly, when "you" is spelled as "u" they are not from the Big Apple who will spell it as "uu."
Visit this link for more info.
allvoices

No comments:

Post a Comment