others, like “might can” and “might would,” are more common in the Lower South.
We may even be able to discover things about various regions that we hadn’t realized before. For example, after “might could,” Grieve turned his attention to swear words, finding that, while people in every state swear, their preferred swear words varied. Keeping it to the somewhat milder terms, people in the American South were especially fond of “hell,” while people in the northern states preferred “asshole,” the Midwest used a lot of “gosh,” and the West Coast liked the Britishy “bollocks” and “bloody.” The Oxford English Dictionary has also begun using Twitter as a source of data, especially for regional words that are less often printed in books and newspapers. The dictionary’s quarterly update notes for September 2017 gave the example of the word “mafted,” a northeastern British term defined as “exhausted from heat, crowds, or exertion.” The example quotations for “mafted” are a study in old-school and new-school lexicography: the oldest citation is from “a glossary compiled around the year 1800,” and the newest is from someone on Twitter in 2010 saying, “Dear Lord—a fur coat on the Bakerloo line, she must have been mafted.”
We can even use creative respellings on Twitter to investigate how people pronounce things differently. It’s a little bit harder than just searching for words, but the linguist Rachael Tatman gave us an example using two well-studied sounds in varieties of English. The first is the pronunciation of words like “cot” and “caught” or “tock” and “talk.” Some Americans (primarily in the West, Midwest, and New England) pronounce each member of the pairs the same, while others (primarily Southerners and African Americans) pronounce them differently—a trend which has been long established by the kind of linguists who make audio recordings. Tatman hypothesized that speakers who do have two distinct vowels in “sod” and “sawed” would sometimes want to call attention to one particular vowel, by respelling it as “aw.” Sure enough, she found that in tweets where a common word, like “on,” “also,” and “because,” was respelled with “aw,” as in “awn,” “awlso,” and “becawse,” there also tended to be respellings for other well-documented features of Southern American English and African American English, such as deleting the “r” in words like “for” and “year” (writing “foah” and “yeah”) and writing “da” and “dat” for “the” and “that.”
But that could just be a coincidence. To test it, Tatman looked at a completely different sound in a completely different region: the pronunciation of words like “to” and “do” as “tae” and “dae.” This sound, and this particular spelling of it, is associated with Scottish English, and has been since Robbie Burns. Here again, Tatman found that people who tweet this respelling tend to show other linguistic markers of Scottishness: they also tweet respellings like “ye” for “you” and “oan” for “on.” To be sure, not all Scots, Southerners, or African Americans use these respellings, and those that do don’t use them all the time. But the point is, when we respell words in casual writing, we tend to do so with a purpose—we jump in with both feet and try to represent our whole manner of speaking. Even if it’s not always this clear which sounds are intended by a particular respelling, looking at which words and sounds people respell can help give linguists an idea of where to focus their audio recording energy.
The internet lets linguists do the kinds of dialect mapping and analysis of spontaneous speech that we’ve been trying to do for centuries, but with more data, from the comfort of a laptop, and without distorting the data by observing it. Just as the telephone study showed that people were still talking like their neighbors rather than like TV and radio broadcasters, and the bicycle peregrinations showed that regional dialects persisted even after centuries of print standardization, the internet studies show us that we often keep our local ways of speaking when we use social media. Our deep wells of enthusiasm for internet dialect quizzes give us a clue about why: talking in particular ways reinforces our networks, our sense of belonging and community.
Networks
Does it ever feel like your family or friend group speaks its very own dialect? This was the premise of a book called Kitchen Table Lingo, which collected examples from what the linguist David Crystal called familects: “the private and personal word-creations that are found in every household and in every social group, but which never get into