%0 Journal Article
%T Spatio-Temporal Variation of Conversational Utterances on Twitter
%A Christian M. Alis
%A May T. Lim
%J PLOS ONE
%D 2013
%I Public Library of Science (PLoS)
%R 10.1371/journal.pone.0077793
%X 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¨CDecember 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.
%U http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0077793