Type suttin instead of something, and you might be from southern New England or New York.
And Philadelphia? Surprise, surprise. The region's cyber-vernacular includes a term that doesn't belong in a family newspaper. It's an abbreviation that means the sender is cracking the (expletive) up - basically a cruder version of LOL (laughing out loud).
The researchers, members of Carnegie Mellon's computer science department, caution that their results come from just a week's worth of data in a rapidly expanding, fluid medium. More analysis is needed to nail down the regional uniqueness of specific words or terms, the scientists wrote in a paper describing the results.
Still, when they presented their findings this month in Pittsburgh, at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, they caused a bit of a sensation.
"It's a lot of fun," said Sali Tagliamonte, a professor of linguistics at the University of Toronto, who heard the presentation. "We can actually see regional dialects."
The researchers analyzed tweets that were sent from mobile phones and had a "tag" specifying the sender's location. They eliminated users who follow more than 1,000 people or who had more than 1,000 followers, in order to filter out commercial and celebrity sources.
They did not tell the computer how many regions to look for, said Noah A. Smith, one of the authors.
"You let the model discover how many regions best explain the data," said Smith, an assistant professor at CMU/Language Technologies Institute.
Each time the authors ran the model through its paces, it started by conducting what was essentially a random search of the data - applying statistics to determine the number, location, and usage patterns of regions. So it came up with a slightly different result each time, generally about a dozen regions, Smith said.
