Twitter provides 'selfies' of evolving language

Twitter and other social media are an immense resource that can offer linguists the opportunity to explore how our words and phrases are changing.

More and more researchers are beginning to work on projects consisting in analysing tweets to catch the next most popular word.

Why Twitter? 

Because its data is public and immediately available. A huge data consisting of around 340 million tweets sent every day, according to Twitter.

Twitter offers records of language mutating in real time and space. Many 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.

Because tweets tend to be rather informal, there are a lot of types of creative usages of words. Tweets appear similar to spontaneous speech, making them particularly valuable to the study of the spread of new words and expressions.

Sources: 

• Linguistic researchers begin hunt for the next 'selfie'
• Using social media to find English lexical blends, By P. Cook (PDF)

Language evolves: from "e-mail" to "email"

The AP Stylebook, the de facto style and usage guide for much of the news media, announced on Friday that the abbreviated term for “electronic mail” is losing a hyphen, and with it, a relic of a simpler time when Internet technology needed to be explained very carefully.

The move follows the AP Stylebook’s decision to change “Web site” to “website” last year, at which time we wrote, “[We] hold our collective breath for other possible updates, such as changing “e-mail” to “email.’”

Since then the recently much more progressive organization also published a set of 42guidelines and definitions for social media, though the future of “e-mail” remained very much in flux.

Today’s news, fittingly enough, was first announced on the AP Stylebook’s Twitter page, where they tweeted: “Language evolves. Today we change AP style from e-mail to email, no hyphen. Our editors will announce it at #ACES2011 today.” Look for the change to be in effect immediately in the online version of the stylebook and in the 2011 print version.

Source:
mashable.com