Social networking terms reveal dialects

Published 12:01 am Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Tweeting about what club “y’all” are going to tonight? Must be from the South. Think that new movie was “koo?” Must be from Northern California.

The words you write on a social networking site can tell people more than just the status of your relationship. It may just indicate not only how you’re living, but where you’re living.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University examined 380,000 messages from Twitter during one week in March 2010 and found that social networking 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 where full of similar examples. Some where obvious — like “y’all” in the South or “yinz” in Pittsburgh.

Associated Press