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My Project

This project sought to measure the degree to which regional divisions in vocabulary were evident on Twitter, in the hopes of better understanding the overall relationship between online speech and regional vocabulary. Five concepts with established regional terms were studied, and their geographic distributions were measured. The hypothesis being tested was that these five concepts would see significant differences in distribution across the four Census Bureau designated regions of the United States. The results were mixed; two of the five concepts had significantly regional distributions, while the other three were too evenly distributed to be considered regional. These findings indicate that at least some elements of America's regionalist vocabulary shine through on the internet, though it may be considerably diluted by travel, formal writing, etc. Confounding factors may also have obscured regional variety, such as the use of some regionalisms for other concepts altogether, and the presence of non-human accounts on Twitter.