According to researchers at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science, regional slang and dialects are as evident in Tweets as they are in everyday conversations.
In many American cities, something is “sumthin”, but apparently in New York City Twitterers prefer to use “suttin”. LOL is a commonly used acronym for “laughing out loud” but in Washington, D.C. the cruder LLS is preferred (laughing like shit).
The study was carried out by Dr Jacob Eisenstein who said that:
“studies of regional dialects traditionally have been based primarily on oral interviews. Written communication often is less reflective of regional influences because writing, even in blogs, tends to be formal and thus homogenized. But Twitter offers a new way of studying regional lexicon because tweets are informal and conversational.”The research was compiled based on the Tweets of 9,500 users during March 2010. It is estimated that there are over 100 million registered users of Twitter, so a sample size of just 9,500 is almost certainly not an accurate representation of the global Twittersphere. Accordingly, the research should be considered with caution.
Dr Eisenstein has presented his paper to the Linguistic Society of America. You can download a copy here.