Geo-twitter 

The idea of being able to tag your geographical location in social media may have been unthinkable decades ago. However, now it is a commonly used application. Researchers have been using these new available technologies to their advantage. Social media have knitted very close bonds with people. Their life is being updated on social media frequently. This would also mean that their language varieties and dialects are used to convey these updates to their followers. Table 1 below shows that only 36% of the language used in twitter is in English, while rest of the percentage is of other languages.

Table 1

With the help of Geo-twitter, researchers have been able to associate language varieties with certain regions.  According to Statista (2013), a reputable statistics portal, English is in the top place  with 36% of usage for the most famous language used in twitter. However, this statistics does not take into account the different varieties of English used in the various regions. With only 140 words available to bring across your message to the twitterverse, acronyms and shortened words have been formed.

A study by Altman and Portilla shows the analysis of evolution of words used in twitter. For example, the word ‘because’ has evolved into ‘cuz’, ‘coz’ and ‘cause’ according to the pronunciation of the people of the region. This analysis shows the different evolutions of the word in various geographical locations. The data of different varieties of the word used in twitter in different locations were collected through application program interface. Around 300 tweet samples with ‘because’ in it were collected for this analysis. The research has shown that the word ‘because’ has been clipped off the first syllable in most of the context such as ‘cuz’ and ‘coz’.  These spellings differentiate the regional use as they are written as how they are pronounced with the different accents. ‘coz’ is prevalently used by the British English speakers while ‘cuz’ is mostly used by American English speakers. Even though less frequent, ‘cz’ was also used instead of the word ‘because’. However, the word ‘cs’ was never found to be used.  Clipping of the word ‘because’ without removal of the first syllable was less common.

Geo-location and phonetic differences

A recent study using the improved Geo-location technologies, Google earth and ArcGIS V. 10.0 has identified differences in the sounds of languages of different areas. This shows the language evolution to fit the environment of the language. The study had focused on the Ejective consonant sound. Ejective consonants found in twenty percent of the world’s languages have commonly been located in languages which are nearer to highly elevated areas as compared to languages without the ejective consonants. This phenomenon may be due to the lower air pressure in raised areas which lowers the effort needed to compress the air in the pharyngeal cavity (Everett,2013). This can be seen image below which shows that compression of air is needed in the process of producing ejective consonants. This also proposes that the languages in the high altitudes may have evolved to have ejective sounds as it is easier to produce in that geographical location.

(ArcGIS V. 10.0 is a geographic information system which acts as an geographic information database)