Whatever your native language, you’ve probably noticed that city people speak it differently than do country folk. But so what? It’s also true that Chicagoans speak a bit differently than do Baltimoreans, and the French of Marseilles is not that of Paris. When it comes to differences in accent, grammar and vocabulary, you might expect that region, culture, social class and gender would count for more than the size of your town. So the people of, say, Caracas, should sound more like their fellow Venezuelans than like people in Miami. But according to this paper, you would be wrong. “The Spanish language,” its authors write, “is split into two superdialects”—a city dialect in which Caracas and Miami have a lot in common, versus a dialect of rural regions and small towns.

As novel as the finding is the method that Bruno Gonçalves and David Sánchez used to distinguish the dialects: They analyzed every tweet made in Spanish over two years for which geolocation data was also available (they don’t say which years). Breaking down these 50 million tweets according to different words used for “computer,” “car,” and other key concepts revealed the boundaries of the two dialects.

The researchers used Spanish because it is widely spoken and widely spread across several continents. Spanish also has plenty of Twitter users (unlike Chinese) to supply evidence. And written Spanish is logical—the letters you see represent the sounds you’d hear. On the other hand, in English (as noted here) the same letter combo can represent five different sounds (“Though I cough through the day, this rough bough comforts me”). Conversely, different sounds can be rendered by the same letters (“Archer, I bow to your bow, and I will lead you to the mines of lead”). That sort of thing, which has incensed sensible people for centuries, messes up textual analysis. More.

See: Big Think

Related Translation News post:

• Computational linguistics of Twitter reveals the existence of global superdialects

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