Miscellany: Items of interest from the broader church and world

Linguists, for those who may be interested, are people who study language. This takes many forms. We may be familiar with Bible translators, but linguists use their expertise to study many different means of communication.

One new field of study may surprise you. Many linguists are now studying tweets—not the tweets of birds but those on Twitter. And Twitter, you may not realize, is a popular form of communication in the social media world. In fact, there are about 500 million messages, each 140 characters or fewer, sent each day on Twitter.

In an article in the Sept. 9 issue of Time, Katy Steinmetz considers some of the research happening around these millions of tweets.

In the past, linguists had to interview people in a lab or go to where they live to gain insights into language use. Now, “Twitter is providing the most enormous stream of data [linguists] have ever had at their disposal,” writes Steinmetz.

What can linguists possibly derive from all these tweets? You’d be surprised. “Hidden in tweets are insights about how we portray our identity in a few short sentences,” writes Steinmetz. Among other things, we can learn about how slang spreads.

Here are some of the interesting things linguists are learning:

• women are more likely to use first-person terms (like I and my) and exclamation points, especially repeated ones;
• men typically share more links and use more technology-related words;
• a female who follows and tweets to a largely male audience is more likely to use features, like numbers, associated with boys, and vice versa for men;
• older tweeters tend to use emoticons with noses—:-) instead of :)—an action tied to their preference for conventional language;
• youthful, “no-nose” tweeters tend to use more swear words;
• young tweeters are more apt to type all-capital words and to use expressive lengthening, like writing “niiiiiice” instead of “nice”;
• the older crowd is more apt to tweet well-wishing phrases like good morning and take care, to send longer tweets and to use more prepositions.

Tweets may also reveal information about geography, income and race. For example, writes Steinmetz, “the term suttin (a variant of something) has been associated with Boston-area tweets, while the acronym ikr (an expression meaning ‘I know, right?’) is popular in the Detroit area.” Tweets using awesome more likely come from wealthy neighborhoods, and “emoticons often appear in tweets sent from areas with a large Hispanic population.”

So what? you ask. As with much science, observation and study precede applications.

But already, advertisers and campaign managers are interested in this research.

Some linguists are using Twitter to construct “subway maps around the United States showing where words tend to move.” Others are investigating how rumors and urban legends change as they’re passed from person to person.

There are limitations. Although there are more than 200 million Twitter users, most tend to be young and urban. And people can lie about themselves.

As with other fields of linguistic study, these researchers encounter new forms of language. “People write on Twitter in ways they never have before,” writes Steinmetz.

For example, Ima serves as a subject, verb and preposition to convey “I am going to.”

The whole social media world may seem like a foreign country to many. But as Twitter grows, study of it will become ever more useful.

Others, like me, who got my B.A. in linguistics many years ago, find such study soooooo cool.