title: Spatio-temporal variation of conversational utterances on Twitter.
abstract: Conversations reflect the existing norms of a language. Previously, we found that utterance lengths in English fictional conversations in books and movies have shortened over a period of 200 years. In this work, we show that this shortening occurs even for a brief period of 3 years (September 2009-December 2012) using 229 million utterances from Twitter. Furthermore, the subset of geographically-tagged tweets from the United States show an inverse proportion between utterance lengths and the state-level percentage of the Black population. We argue that shortening of utterances can be explained by the increasing usage of jargon including coined words.
authors.affiliation: National Institute of Physics, University of the Philippines, Diliman, Quezon City, Philippines.
authors.forename: Christian M
authors.initials: CM
authors.lastname: Alis
authors.forename: May T
authors.initials: MT
authors.lastname: Lim
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D003142:Communication; D006801:Humans; D020407:Internet; D007802:Language; D010700:Phonetics; D062211:Spatio-Temporal Analysis; D014825:Vocabulary