It's commonly accepted that widespread national television helped smooth over many local US accents and standardized "proper" English usage; will services like Twitter, where people use more colloquial language, have the same effect on regional slang? A new study from Carnegie Mellon University finds that, so far, regional variation is alive and well on Twitter. All yinz in Pittsburgh and all yous in New Jersey can still find plenty of support on the microblogging service.
Jacob Eisenstein, Brendan O'Connor, Noah Smith, and Eric Xing of CMU's Computer Science department used Twitter's official API to grab 15 percent of all tweets during one week in March 2010. They then filtered the dataset to include only tweets that were geotagged and which had fewer than a thousand followers, and they removed any tweet with a URL or those that came from outside the US. The goal: to eliminate bots, celebrities, and PR firms, leaving only real people with local networks of friends.
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