Where people use certain words

Nikhil Sonnad for Quartz mapped the top 100,000 words used in tweets. Search to your heart’s content.

The data for these maps are drawn from billions of tweets collected by geographer Diansheng Guo in 2014. Jack Grieve, a forensic linguist at Aston University in the United Kingdom, along with Andrea Nini of the University of Manchester, identified the top 100,000 words used in these tweets and how often they are used in every county in the continental United States, based on location data from Twitter.

See also the dialect quiz and maps by Josh Katz from a few years back.

Tags: , ,

Dialect book of maps

Speaking American Book

In 2013, Josh Katz put together a dialect quiz that showed where people talk like you, based on your own vocabulary. Things like coke versus soda. It’s a fine example of how we’re often talking about the same thing but say or express it differently. Speaking American is the book version of the dialect quiz results.

It’s a fun coffee/kitchen table book to flip through casually. It’s not just a book maps. It’s a highlight of the interesting bits and provides some short explanations for why the differences exist. I’ve been enjoying bits and pieces on the occasion my son takes an unreasonable amount of time to finish his dinner.

Get it on Amazon.

Tags: , ,