Short-scale shortening of Twitter utterances

Abstract

Conversations reflect the existing norms of a language. Previously, we found that utterance lengths in English fictional conversations in books and movies have shortened over a period of 200 years. In this work, we show that this shortening occurs even for a brief period of 3 years (September 2009-December 2012) using 229 million utterances from Twitter. We argue that shortening of utterances can be explained by the increasing usage of jargon including coined words.