Outlook - cdevelotte. Inbox (6) - cdevelotte - Gmail. Twitter shows language evolves in cities. WHERE do new words come from? On Twitter at least, they often begin life in cities with large African American populations before spreading more widely, according to a study of the language used on the social network. Jacob Eisenstein at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta and colleagues examined 30 million tweets sent from US locations between December 2009 and May 2011. Several new terms spread during this period, including "bruh", an alternative spelling of "bro" or "brother", which first arose in a few south-east cities before eventually hopping to parts of California. Residents of Cleveland, Ohio, were the first to use "ctfu", an abbreviation of "cracking the fuck up", usage that has since spread into Pennsylvania (arxiv.org/abs/1210.5268).
After collecting the data, the team built a mathematical model that captures the large-scale flow of new words between cities. New Scientist Not just a website! Share on emailShare on gmailShare on stumbleupon More From New Scientist. Learn English online: How the internet is changing language. Online, English has become a common language for users from around the world. In the process, the language itself is changing. When America emerged from the ashes of a bruising war with Britain in 1814, the nation was far from united. Noah Webster thought that a common language would bring people together and help create a new identity that would make the country truly independent of the British. Webster's dictionary, now in its 11th edition, adopted the Americanised spellings familiar today - er instead of re in theatre, dropping the u from colour, and losing the double l from words such as traveller.
An American Dictionary of the English Language took 18 years to complete and Webster learned 26 other languages in order to research the etymology of its 70,000 entries. The internet is creating a similar language evolution, but at a much faster pace. There are now thought to be some 4.5 billion web pages worldwide. Others combine English words to make something new. Take Hinglish. 1210.5268v3. Electronic Classroom: September 1997 Exploring Literacy Column from RT. Caity's Question: Literacy as Deixis on the Internet Donald J. Leu, Jr. Syracuse University Syracuse, New York, United States Several years ago, more than I wish to admit, our 4-year-old daughter, Caity, turned to me and asked a simple, but profound question. "Dad," she said, "is today tomorrow? " "No," I said, trying my parental best to be helpful and clear up any confusion.
Thinking about this a bit later, my response troubled me. Thinking about Caity's question eventually led me to an understanding of deixis, a linguistic term used to capture the special qualities of words like today, tomorrow, and here whose meanings are dependent upon the time or space in which they are uttered (Fillmore, 1966, 1972, 1975). Discovering the changing meanings for deictic terms is an important linguistic challenge for young children who have come to believe that words have fixed meanings (Murphy, 1986). When Caity asked, "Is today tomorrow? " Is Today Tomorrow? Changes in Why We Need to Be Literate "Dad. Personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/martin.lea/papers/1998-EJ Postmes Spears Lea Boundaries CR.pdf. Politeness Theory and Computer-Mediated Communication: A Sociolinguistic Approach to Analyzing Relational Messages.
Trends. David Crystal - Internet Language. Topical index of Internet linguistic resources. 4chan and /b/: An Analysis of Anonymity and Ephemerality in a Large Online Community. La langue du cyberespace: de la diversité aux normes - Jeannine Gerbault - Google Books. Mining the internet for linguistic and social data: An analysis of ‘carbon compounds’ in Web feeds. Interactional Coherence in CMC. Estimating Linguistic Diversity on the Internet: A Taxonomy to Avoid Pitfalls and Paradoxes.