Researchers at Carnegie Mellon decided to parse 380,000 tweets looking for differences in regional dialect.
Not surprisingly, Northern Californians write that they are “hella tired” rather than the more Southern Californian “tired af” (as fuck). Tweets in New York City turned up with “something” written as “suttin,” and the word “koo” for “cool” is found in North Carolina (and the Philippines!).
However, these findings are not conclusive, the study cautions:
While research in perceptual dialectology does confirm the link of hella to Northern California (Bucholtz et al., 2007), we caution that our findings are merely suggestive, and a more rigorous analysis must be undertaken before making definitive statements about the regional membership of individual terms.
Carnegie Mellon’s researchers were able to pull some Twitterisms and translate them using UrbanDictionary.com. Here are some:
af – as fuck (very)
coo – cool
dl – download
fasho – for sure
gna – going to
iam – I am
ima – I’m going to
imm – I’m
iono – I don’t know
lames – lame (not cool)
jp – just playing (kidding)
koo – cool
od – overdone (very)
omw – on my way
smh – shake my head
wyd – what are you doing
[via Yahoo! News]
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