Interesting Snippets

A team of computational linguists at Carnegie Mellon University… has used geocoded tweets to build maps of regional language use across the United States. …

From these mountains of data can be gleaned hidden patterns of informal English, like the profusion of hella as a form of emphasis in Northern California, as in, “It’s hella cold out there.” Slangy phonetic spellings also show distinct patterns of distribution, with New Yorkers preferring suttin to sumthin (for something) and Californians writing koo or coo for cool. Even emoticons differ from region to region