March 3, 2014

Linguistic study into how new words spread on Twitter


The way in which new words become popular and spread across the UK and US will be mapped out for the first time in a ground-breaking study conducted at Aston University. 

The investigation, led by Dr Jack Grieve, Lecturer in Forensic Linguistics at Aston, will use Twitter as a source of linguistic data. More than a billion tweets sent over a one-year period in both countries will be analysed to determine where new words originate from and how they become geographically dispersed as time progresses.