Twitter provides a selfie of evolving language

Social media introduces new words

Social media introduces new words

• Social media has made written language much

more ‘visible’.

• We need to compensate for lack of non-verbal communication.

We write how we speak

• Recent research in Natural Language Processing (NLP) has demonstrated that people on social media platforms intentionally write how they speak.

Social media increases the volume and speed of daily communications

The users of social media produce a tremendous

amount of text each day.

Social media as available corpora

Social media as available corpora

• The Big amount of Data allows:

– to search, for example, the word “the”, getting 607 million tokens in the last month alone.

– to map the emergence of new words and their lexical diffusion.

Social media as available corpora

• Text is readily available for lexicographical analysis.

• Easy access to very large corpora.

• Given the right tools and know-how, anyone can search that published material.

• Corpus patterns that are very rare in conventional-size corpora turn to have many occurrences in the very large corpora of social media.

Real-time language public data to analyse:

340 million tweets sent every day, according to Twitter.

Why Twitter?

Language in action

• Instead of relying on questionnaires and other laborious and time-consuming methods of data collection, social scientists can simply take advantage of Twitter’s stream to eavesdrop on a virtually limitless array of language in action.

Why Twitter?

• Tweets tend to be rather informal.

• Tweets appear similar to spontaneous speech, making them particularly valuable to the study of the spread of new words and expressions.

• On Twitter, it is possible to see a word at the moment of its coinage:

– Twitter limits the “Tweet” to 140 characters, thus pushing its users to become more adept at saying what they want or need to say with fewer words.

– 57% of neologisms on Twitter come from blends.

Twitter and neologisms

• Twitter has been at the forefront of recent linguistic developments, with words such as ‘selfie’, ‘twerk’, ‘vom’, ‘buzzworthy’ and ‘squee’ all making it into the Oxford Dictionaries Online in 2013.

Twitter and neologisms

Analysis of a Tweet

Why Twitter?

Tweets provide location data and the time they were sent allowing thus to map out the way in which new words become popular and spread.

• Geolocation information provides:

– social classes,

– patterns of immigration and

– how groups are influencing each other.

• The interaction between geographic features, historical migrations, and a 'snapshot' of linguistic data can tell us about our language and ourselves.

Why Twitter?

Twitter in NYC

Why Twitter

Twitter represents the intersection of historical linguistics, dialect geography, spatial

statistics, and #swag.

HOW NEW WORDS ARE SELECTED

How new words are selected

• Ease of use/interpretation.

• Usefulness: does the word fill a lexical gap?

• Relevant in society over time?

• High degree of exposure.

FUDGE by Alan Metcalf

Frequency of use Unobtrusiveness Diversity of users and situations Generation of other forms and meanings Endurance of the concept

Each new word gets a score of 0, 1, or 2 on each factor. It’s not a mathematical formula but a judgment call.

The higher the total, the more likely a word will endure

for generations.

HOW TO FIND NEOLOGISMS ON TWITTER

By means of a simple computational method for identifying English lexical blends by exploiting the massive amount of text available on Twitter.

Like a Pro

How to find neologisms on Twitter

How to find neologisms on Twitter

Follow the Pros

Follow the Pros

Follow the Pros

@wordspy @StanCarey @bgzimmer @wordnik @Fritinancy @Kerry_Maxi

@OUPAcademic

@CambridgeWords

@OxfordWords

@Mededitor

@PurplePenning

@PeterSokolowski

@MacDictionary

@KoryStamper

@emckean

@eabrewster

Follow the Pros

#wordwatch

#wordwatch

#Wordwatch round up

• This feature investigates interest in words influenced by news and other current events.

• The graphs are based on data from OxfordDictionaries.com over a four-week period and explores changes in term lookups across the entire website.

Follow the News

• Twitter is a newswire other than a social platform.

• By following the social spotlights on Twitter new words will pop-up.

Comet landing

Philae

Rosetta

#shirtflap

#shirtstorm #shirtstorm

#shirtgate

ISSpresso

Comet landing > ‘accometaggio’

accometaggio

Follow the events: WotY

"Word of the Year" and abbreviated "WOTY" (or "WotY"), refers to any of various assessments as to the most important word(s) or expression(s) in the public sphere during a specific year.

WOTY 2014

WOTY 2013

WOTY Word of the year

• The oldest WOTY, at the end of the calendar year, determined by a vote of independent linguists, is the American Dialect Society's Word of the Year.

• US

– American Dialect Society

– Global Language Monitor

The Global Language Monitor

English-speaking world: 1.83 billion speakers (January 2013 estimate).

GLM employs its NarrativeTracker technologies for global Internet and social media analysis.

NarrativeTracker is based on global discourse, providing a real-time, accurate picture about any topic, at any point in time.

NarrativeTracker analyzes the Internet, blogosphere, the top 300.000 print and electronic global media, as well as social media sources as they emerge.

How to find neologisms on Twitter

WOTY Word of the year

• UK

– The lists of Merriam-Webster's Words of the Year (for each year) are ten-word lists published annually.

– Oxford University Press announces an Oxford Dictionaries UK Word of the Year and an Oxford Dictionaries US Word of the Year.

…recent years

Lexicography gets adorkable

“Twictionary”

• No more up to lexicographers to select words but it is only up to the users to decide and vote for the inclusion of new words in the dictionary.

Thank you!

mariapia.montoro@gmail.com