Spatio-temporal variation of conversational utterances on Twitter
This work addresses linguistic change in social media for researchers, but it is incremental as it extends prior findings on utterance shortening to a new dataset.
The study found that conversational utterances on Twitter shortened over three years, with a correlation between shorter utterances and higher percentages of Black population in U.S. states, attributing this to increased jargon usage.
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.