Regional Slang “Alive and Well” on Twitter

Thursday, 13 January 2011 | by Pat's Picks

Even when reduced to 140 characters, regional slang still enters our conversations says the Philadelphia Inquirer. A study of 385,000 tweets by computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon found that Twitter users who used ‘hella’ to mean ‘really’ were probably from Northern California. And anyone who refers to ‘something’ as ‘suttin’ is probably a New Yorker.

The researchers say they were able to estimate a person’s location within 300 miles just by looking at their tweets. Some more examples? Philly residents have their own version of LOL, “an abbreviation that means the sender is cracking the (expletive) up.” And Twitterers all over the Northeast corridor use SMH to indicate that they are shaking their heads.

Read more about the team’s research here