Medical Lessons

I was lis­tening to All Things Con­sidered yes­terday while preparing dinner. A short, inter­esting story came on: You Have An Accent Even On Twitter. The NPR host, Robert Siegel, inter­viewed Jacob Eisen­stein, a post-​​​​doc at Carnegie Mellon who has been exam­ining regional vari­ances in Twitter usage.

Some high­lighted examples of Twitter dialecticisms:

In New York, people tend to do “suttin” (i.e. some­thing, and usually having nothing to do with Sutton Place)

The use of “hella” to mean “very” as in “I’m hella tired” is more com­monly iterated by people who’ve lived in Northern California.

(LOL is uni­ver­sally understood.)

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I was suf­fi­ciently intrigued to track down Dr. Eisenstein’s paper, A Latent Variable Model for Geo­graphical Lexical Vari­ation, pre­sented on January 8 at the annual meeting of the Lin­guistics Society of America in Pitts­burgh. It’s a tech­nical article befitting an MIT graduate, with un-​​​​trendy headings like “Cas­cading Topic Models,” “Inference” and heavy math. Still, I enjoyed

See more Regional Dialects on Twitter, and Other Things You Gotta Know