Welsh Twitter: capturing language change in real time

A database of Welsh tweets is being used to identify the characteristics of an evolving language. If I want to find out whether a particular construction is emerging, I would normally have to conduct a time-consuming pilot study, but with Twitter I can get a rough and ready answer in 30 minutes - David Willis Twitter keeps millions of people in touch, whether it's sharing their politics with followers or updating their mates with the trivia of everyday life. These tweets are in Welsh: 'loaaaads o gwaith i neud a di'r laptop 'cau gwithio!', 'dio cau dod on!! Mar bwtwm di tori.' Roughly translated, they read: 'loads of work to do and the laptop won't work' and 'it won't come on!! The button's broke.' How do you capture changes as they take place in the language we use in everyday life - from buzz words such as 'sweet' to tags such as 'innit'? One answer is to look at tweets. Because they don't follow the conventions of written language, tweets provide an authentic snapshot of the spoken language. By analysing the content of the 140-character messages, linguists can get to grips with the dynamics of the language played out in real time. Welsh is spoken by 562,000 people in Wales; 8% of the country's children learn it at home as their first language and 22% are educated in Welsh. Like all living languages, Welsh is constantly changing and new varieties are emerging.