Thanks to Twitter, these researchers have reached a curious conclusion: there are two large superdialects, one common to large Spanish and American cities and the other typical of rural areas.
Bruno Gonçalves, from the University of Toulon (France) and David Sánchez, from the Institute of Interdisciplinary Physics and Complex Systems (IFISC, CSIC-UIB) in Spain, have used geolocated Twitter tweets to analyze how the way of speaking changes according to the different regions. In total, they have collected about 50 million tweets written in Spanish over two years. Of all of them, most had been launched from Spain, Latin America and the United States, although they also compiled tweets from Latin America and Eastern Europe.
Once collected, they chose different words that vary depending on the geography to analyze them. For example ‘car’ can be said in many other ways such as auto, car, concho, automobile … The same happens, for example with the word ‘computer’ that can be cited as computer, PC, computer, and so on.
Thus, by crossing the use of these words with their geographical location, they obtained a map of areas where these synonyms were more or less used, being able to reach a curious conclusion: there are two superdialects of Spanish within the blue bird social network. The first of them is a kind of international variety of Spanish whose use is practically reduced to the main American and Spanish cities. The second of them would be the most used in rural areas .
As pointed out by the SINC scientific news agency, for Gonçalves and Sánchez the first case would be explained due to the increasing homogenization of the language caused by different leveling mechanisms (education, media, Twitter …). In the second, in rural areas of Spain and America, three different varieties were detected that correspond to a dialect used in Spain, another present in large areas of Latin America and a third exclusive to the southern cone.
The researchers think that their work ” opens a new arc of possibilities for new applications in computational linguistic studies, a field full of great opportunities, ” they point out to SINC.
