Do you say sneakers , gym shoes , or trainer ? Soda , tonic , or fizzy drinkable ? Your selection has a band to do with where you ’re from . Certain terminal figure alter by region , and it should be potential to get a good picture of regional dispute in lexicon by searching for these term on Twitter and diagram where they come from using geolocation data .
AsMIT Technology Reviewreports , a young work did just that for variable terms in Spanish . As expected , terms known to distinguish various idiom of Spanish represent well , in tweets , to the areas they are normally associated with . For example , the single-valued function above shows that a computer is call acomputadorain Mexico , anordenadorin Spain and acomputadorin Chile . The different terms for car — car , carro , coche , concho , andmovi — are also mapped . The size of the dots corresponds to the bit of tweets with that condition .
But researchers Bruno Gonçalves and David Sánchez also found something unexpected when they compound the datum on all the words together . There were two main dialect groups , and they were divide not by region , but by population concentration . There were two “ superdialects”—one in thick , urban kernel , and another in smaller Town and rural areas . The rural areas “ keep a tumid issue of characteristic items and aboriginal words , ” while city , more capable to the forces of globalization , tend toward “ dialect unification , smooth possible lexical differences . ” The urban superdialect is a less differentiate , international Spanish , and the rural superdialect is more wide-ranging and less subject to international leveling , despite the fact that everyone in the bailiwick is using Twitter .
We do n’t speak otherwise just because we live in unlike position , but because we live otherwise . This is something sociolinguists have recognise for a long clock time . Advances in techniques for analyzing the vast amount of language data on Twitter offer raw ways to expect at how our lives influence our language .
The original paper ishere .
