Twitter Shows Language Evolves In Cities

I've always been fascinated with the evolution of language. Now comes a new study that points to cities as a hotbed of language creation and it seems that Twitter is being used as a measurement. From the article in New Scientist.....

"Jacob Eisenstein at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta and colleagues examined 30 million tweets sent from US locations between December 2009 and May 2011. Several new terms spread during this period, including "bruh", an alternative spelling of "bro" or "brother", which first arose in a few south-east cities before eventually hopping to parts of California."

The article goes on to give other examples and states that African Americans account for a great deal of the word creation. Again, from the article.....

"Researchers have tracked the diffusion of words like "cool" and "uptight" from black communities to mainstream use in the past. "We have thousands of examples," says Eisenstein. Their data cannot shed light on why the flow is in this direction, but he notes that language is just one cultural area in which traditions have spread outwards from African American communities."