English to Russian Other Linguistics Journalism/Twitter

Researchers are, as it happens, looking seriously at Twitter. Ben Zimmer wrote in the New York Times this weekend that several projects are analysing the language on the microblogging platform. For example

A team of computational linguists at Carnegie Mellon University led by Jacob Eisenstein and Brendan O’Connor has used geocoded tweets to build maps of regional language use across the United States. The amount of data available for analysis is many orders of magnitude bigger than what could be collected with traditional dialect surveys.
From these mountains of data can be gleaned hidden patterns of informal English, like the profusion of hella as a form of emphasis in Northern California, as in, “It’s hella cold out there.” Slangy phonetic spellings also show distinct patterns of distribution, with New Yorkers preferring suttin to sumthin (for something) and Californians writing koo or coo for cool. Even emoticons differ from region to region

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