Language Evolution in Social Media: a Preliminary Study

Language, as a social phenomenon, is in constant evolution. New words are added, disused ones are forgotten, and some others change their morphology and semantics to adapt to a dynamic World. Today we are leaving a new “Social Media” revolution, that is changing many languages. The pace with which new words are created in social media is unprecedented. People from different demographic groups are often “speaking different languages”, in that not only they use a different set of words, but also assign different meanings to the same words. In this paper, we investigate whether it is possible to lower the “linguistic barrier”, by analyzing the phenomenon of language evolution in social media, and by evaluating to what extent the use of cooperative on-line dictionaries and natural language processing techniques can help in tracking and regulate the evolution of languages in the social media era. We report a study of language evolution in a specific social media, Twitter; and we evaluate whether cooperative dictionaries (specifically Urban Dictionary) can be used to deal with the evolving language. We discover that this method partially solves the problem, by allowing a better understanding of the behavior of new words and expressions. We then analyze how natural language processing techniques can be used to capture the meaning of new words and expressions.