Ckoo, ya'llzins

Tweets have regional accents

PITTSBURGH – Tweeting about what club "y'all" are going to tonight? Must be from the South. Looking forward to "suttin" special? Then you probably live in New York. Think that new movie was "koo?" Northern California.

The words you write on Twitter can tell people more than just the status of your relationship or how you like the latest Bon Jovi CD. It may just indicate not only how you're living, but where you're living in the U.S.

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.

Take the word cool. Southern Californians tend to write the shorthand "coo," while their neighbors up north use the phonetic shorthand "koo."

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."

I spent the first 18 years of my life in Southern California (and yeah, we talked like that), moved to Northern California, and married a local, went on to Oregon, Florida, and wound up in Southern Maryland, which is just far enough south that ya'll is heard with some regularity. My kids moved to the Pittsburgh area, and visiting has taught us the "yinz" or "yousins" usage.  Assuming I ever get on Twitter, how the hell am I supposed to tweet?