Super-dialects exposed via millions of tweets

Abstract

Bruno Goncalves at Aix-Marseille University in France and David Sanchez at the Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Physics and Complex Systems in Palma Majorca Spain, analyzed more than 50 million tweets sent over a two-year period. By comparing these word choices to where they came from, the researchers were able to map preferences across continents. According to their data, Twitter users in major cities thousands of miles apart, like Quito in Ecuador and San Diego CA, tend to have more language in common with each other than with a person tweeting from the nearby countryside, probably due to the influence of mass media.