Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University examined 380,000 messages from Twitter during one week in March 2010 and found that the social networking site is full of its own kinds of geographical dialects.

The 4.5 million words the researchers examined were full of similar examples. Some were obvious — like “y’all” in the South or “yinz” in Pittsburgh — and some more mysterious. The word “suttin” was found over and over in New York City, a shorthand for “something.”

Jacob Eisenstein, a post-doctoral fellow of computer science in Carnegie Mellon’s Machine Learning Department, and his colleagues were able to analyze the geotags attached to Twitter messages sent from mobile phones for the study. In all, they looked at 4.5 million words.

Scott Kiesling, associate professor of linguistics at the University of Pittsburgh, said social media provides researchers lots of easily obtainable data in which they can explore and examine how people are speaking. He said the next step is examining whether these phrases spread like “pancake batter hitting a pan or hop from city to city” — if they spread at all.

See: USA Today