So one of my side projects is looking at what people are doing when they choose to spell something differently–what sort of knowledge about language are we encoding when we decide to spell “talk” like “tawk”, or “playing” like “pleying”? Some of these variant spelling probably don’t have anything to do with pronunciation, like “gawd” or “dawg”, which I think are more about establishing a playful, informal tone. But I think that some variant spellings absolutely are encoding specific pronunciation. Take a look at this tweet, for example (bolding mine):
What a devastating gut wrenching loss for Michigan. But dats spawts, dats life.
— SpawtsChat (@legitsportstalk) October 17, 2015
There are three different spelling here, two which look like th-stopping (where the “th” sound as in “that” is produced as a “d” sound instead) and one that looks like r-lessness (where someone doesn’t produce the r sound in some words). But unfortunately I don’t have a recording of the person who wrote this tweet; there’s no way I can know if they produce these words in the same way in their speech as they do when typing.
Fortunately, I was able to find someone who 1) uses variant spellings in their Twitter and 2) I could get a recording of:
This let me directly compare how this particular speaker tweets to how they speak. So what did I find? Do they tweet the same way they speak? It turns out that that actually depends.
- Yes! For some things (like the th-stopping and r-lessness like I mentioned above) this person does tweet and speak in pretty much the same way. They won’t use an “r” in spelling where they wouldn’t say an “r” sound and vice versa.
- No! But for other things (like saying “ing” words “in” or saying words like “coffin” and “coughing” with a different vowel in the first syllable) while this person does them a lot in thier speech, they aren’t using variant spellings at the same level in thier tweets. So they’ll say “runnin” 80% of the time, for example, but type it as “running” 60% of the time (rather than 20%, which is what we’d expect if the Twitter and speech data were showing the same thing).
So what’s going on? Why are only some things being used in the same way on Twitter and in speech? To answer that we’ll need to dig a little deeper into the way these things in speech.
- How are th-stopping and r-lessness being used in speech? So when you compare the video above to one of the sports radio announcer that’s being parodied (try this one) you’ll find that they’re actually used more in the video above than they are in the speech that’s being parodied. This is pretty common in situations where someone’s really laying on a particular accent (even one they speak natively), which sociolinguists call a performance register.
- What about the other things? The things that aren’t being used as often Twitter as they are on speech, on the other hand, actually show up at the same levels in speech, both for the parody and the original. This speaker isn’t overshooting thier use of these features; instead they’re just using them in the way that another native speaker of a dialect would.
So there’s a pretty robust pattern showing up here. This person is only tweeting the way they speak for a very small set of things: those things that are really strongly associated with this dialect and that they’re really playing up in thier speech. In other words, they tend to use the things that they’re paying a lot of attention to in the same way both in speech and on Twitter. That makes sense. If you’re very careful to do something when you’re talking–not splitting an infinitive or ending a sentence with a preposition, maybe–you’re probably not going to do it when you’re talking. But if there’s something that you do all the time when you’re talking and aren’t really aware of then it probably show up in your writing. For example, there are lots of little phrases I’ll use in my speech (like “no worries”, for example) that I don’t think I’ve ever written down, even in really informal contexts. (Except for here, obviously.)
So the answer to whether tweets and speech act the same way is… is depends. Which is actually really useful! Since it looks like it’s only the things that people are paying a lot of attention to that get overshot in speech and Twitter, this can help us figure out what things people think are really important by looking at how they use them on Twitter. And that can help us understand what it is that makes a dialect sound different, which is useful for things like dialect coaching, language teaching and even helping computers understand multiple dialects well.
(BTW, If you’re interested in more details on this project, you can see my poster, which I’ll be presenting at NWAV44 this weekend, here.)
makingnoiseandhearingthings.com 