May T. Lim

Christian M. Alis, May T. Lim

Conversations reflect the existing norms of a language. Previously, we found that utterance lengths in English fictional conversations in books and movies have shortened over a period of 200 years. In this work, we show that this shortening occurs even for a brief period of 3 years (September 2009-December 2012) using 229 million utterances from Twitter. Furthermore, the subset of geographically-tagged tweets from the United States show an inverse proportion between utterance lengths and the state-level percentage of the Black population. We argue that shortening of utterances can be explained by the increasing usage of jargon including coined words.

Christian M. Alis, May T. Lim

Conversations allow the quick transfer of short bits of information and it is reasonable to expect that changes in communication medium affect how we converse. Using conversations in works of fiction and in an online social networking platform, we show that the utterance length of conversations is slowly shortening with time but adapts more strongly to the constraints of the communication medium. This indicates that the introduction of any new medium of communication can affect the way natural language evolves.