IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/pal/palcom/v5y2019i1d10.1057_s41599-019-0280-3.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

How character limit affects language usage in tweets

Author

Listed:
  • Arnout B. Boot

    (Erasmus University Rotterdam)

  • Erik Tjong Kim Sang

    (Netherlands eScience Center)

  • Katinka Dijkstra

    (Erasmus University Rotterdam)

  • Rolf A. Zwaan

    (Erasmus University Rotterdam)

Abstract

In November 2017 Twitter doubled the available character space from 140 to 280 characters. This provided an opportunity for researchers to investigate the linguistic effects of length constraints in online communication. We asked whether the character limit change (CLC) affected language usage in Dutch tweets and hypothesized that there would be a reduction in the need for character-conserving writing styles. Pre-CLC tweets were compared with post-CLC tweets. Three separate analyses were performed: (I) general analysis: the number of characters, words, and sentences per tweet, as well as the average word and sentence length. (II) Token analysis: the relative frequency of tokens and bigrams; (III) part-of-speech analysis: the grammatical structure of the sentences in tweets (i.e., adjectives, adverbs, articles, conjunctives, interjections, nouns, prepositions, pronouns, and verbs); pre-CLC tweets showed relatively more textisms, which are used to abbreviate and conserve character space. Consequently, they represent more informal language usage (e.g., internet slang); in turn, post-CLC tweets contained relatively more articles, conjunctions, and prepositions. The results show that online language producers adapt their texts to overcome limit constraints.

Suggested Citation

  • Arnout B. Boot & Erik Tjong Kim Sang & Katinka Dijkstra & Rolf A. Zwaan, 2019. "How character limit affects language usage in tweets," Palgrave Communications, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 5(1), pages 1-13, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:palcom:v:5:y:2019:i:1:d:10.1057_s41599-019-0280-3
    DOI: 10.1057/s41599-019-0280-3
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://link.springer.com/10.1057/s41599-019-0280-3
    File Function: Abstract
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1057/s41599-019-0280-3?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Grolemund, Garrett & Wickham, Hadley, 2011. "Dates and Times Made Easy with lubridate," Journal of Statistical Software, Foundation for Open Access Statistics, vol. 40(i03).
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Puklavec, Žiga & Kogler, Christoph & Stavrova, Olga & Zeelenberg, Marcel, 2023. "What we tweet about when we tweet about taxes: A topic modelling approach," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 212(C), pages 1242-1254.
    2. Michal Ptaszynski & Agata Pieciukiewicz & Pawel Dybala & Pawel Skrzek & Kamil Soliwoda & Marcin Fortuna & Gniewosz Leliwa & Michal Wroczynski, 2023. "Expert-Annotated Dataset to Study Cyberbullying in Polish Language," Data, MDPI, vol. 9(1), pages 1-26, December.
    3. Puklavec, Žiga & Stavrova, Olga & Kogler, Christoph & Zeelenberg, Marcel, 2024. "Diffusion of tax-related communication on social media," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 110(C).
    4. Amal Marzouki & Arbi Chouikh & Sehl Mellouli & Rim Haddad, 2021. "From Sustainable Development Goals to Sustainable Cities: A Social Media Analysis for Policy-Making Decision," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 13(15), pages 1-21, July.
    5. Saad Nor Hasliza Md & San Chin Wei & Yaacob Zulnaidi, 2023. "Twitter Sentiment Analysis of the Low-Cost Airline Services After COVID-19 Outbreak: The Case of AirAsia," Business Systems Research, Sciendo, vol. 14(2), pages 1-23, December.
    6. Jiping Cao & Hartwig H. Hochmair & Fisal Basheeh, 2022. "The Effect of Twitter App Policy Changes on the Sharing of Spatial Information through Twitter Users," Geographies, MDPI, vol. 2(3), pages 1-14, September.
    7. Ebaa Fayyoumi & Sahar Idwan, 2021. "Semantic Partitioning and Machine Learning in Sentiment Analysis," Data, MDPI, vol. 6(6), pages 1-17, June.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Laha, A. K. & Putatunda, Sayan, 2017. "Travel Time Prediction for Taxi-GPS Data Streams," IIMA Working Papers WP 2017-03-03, Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, Research and Publication Department.
    2. Fraccaroli, Nicolò & Giovannini, Alessandro & Jamet, Jean-François & Persson, Eric, 2022. "Ideology and monetary policy. The role of political parties’ stances in the European Central Bank’s parliamentary hearings," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 74(C).
    3. Michael A Ruderman & Deirdra F Wilson & Savanna Reid, 2015. "Does Prison Crowding Predict Higher Rates of Substance Use Related Parole Violations? A Recurrent Events Multi-Level Survival Analysis," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 10(10), pages 1-19, October.
    4. Loke Schmalensee & Pauline Caillault & Katrín Hulda Gunnarsdóttir & Karl Gotthard & Philipp Lehmann, 2023. "Seasonal specialization drives divergent population dynamics in two closely related butterflies," Nature Communications, Nature, vol. 14(1), pages 1-13, December.
    5. Koch, Steven F. & Nkuna, Blessings & Ye, Yuxiang, 2024. "Income elasticity of residential electricity consumption in rural South Africa," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 131(C).
    6. repec:irf:wpaper:010 is not listed on IDEAS
    7. Verena K. Brändle & Olga Eisele, 2023. "A Thin Line: Governmental Border Communication in Times of European Crises," Journal of Common Market Studies, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 61(3), pages 597-615, May.
    8. Haider, Saira M. & Benscoter, Allison M. & Pearlstine, Leonard & D'Acunto, Laura E. & Romañach, Stephanie S., 2021. "Landscape-scale drivers of endangered Cape Sable Seaside Sparrow (Ammospiza maritima mirabilis) presence using an ensemble modeling approach," Ecological Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 461(C).
    9. Nicholas Tierney & Dianne Cook, 2018. "Expanding tidy data principles to facilitate missing data exploration, visualization and assessment of imputations," Monash Econometrics and Business Statistics Working Papers 14/18, Monash University, Department of Econometrics and Business Statistics.
    10. Gregory Eady & Tom Paskhalis & Jan Zilinsky & Richard Bonneau & Jonathan Nagler & Joshua A. Tucker, 2023. "Exposure to the Russian Internet Research Agency foreign influence campaign on Twitter in the 2016 US election and its relationship to attitudes and voting behavior," Nature Communications, Nature, vol. 14(1), pages 1-11, December.
    11. David Van Dijcke & Austin L. Wright, 2021. "Profiling Insurrection: Characterizing Collective Action Using Mobile Device Data," Working Papers 2021-13, Becker Friedman Institute for Research In Economics.
    12. Rieger, Jonas & von Nordheim, Gerret, 2021. "corona100d: German-language Twitter dataset of the first 100 days after Chancellor Merkel addressed the coronavirus outbreak on TV," DoCMA Working Papers 4, TU Dortmund University, Dortmund Center for Data-based Media Analysis (DoCMA).
    13. Christian Thiele & Gerrit Hirschfeld & Ruth Brachel, 2021. "Clinical trial registries as Scientometric data: A novel solution for linking and deduplicating clinical trials from multiple registries," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(12), pages 9733-9750, December.
    14. Braun, Michael T. & Adams, Nicole B. & O'Grady, Courtney E. & Miller, Deserai L. & Bystrinski, Jonathan, 2020. "An exploration of youth physically restrained in mental health residential treatment centers," Children and Youth Services Review, Elsevier, vol. 110(C).
    15. Röseler, Lukas & Bögler, Hannah L. & Koßmann, Lisa & Krueger, Sabine M. & Bickenbach, Sabrina L. C. & Bühler, Ricarda & della Guardia, Jasmin & Köppel, Lisa-Marie A. & Möhring, Jarl & Ponader, Susanne, 2024. "Need for Cognition, Cognitive Load, and Forewarning do not Moderate Anchoring Effects. A Replication Study of Epley & Gilovich (Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 2005; Psychological Science, 2006," Journal of Comments and Replications in Economics (JCRE), ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 3(2024-8), pages 1-42.
    16. Arthur Novaes de Amorim & Rob Deardon & Vineet Saini, 2021. "A stacked ensemble method for forecasting influenza-like illness visit volumes at emergency departments," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 16(3), pages 1-15, March.
    17. Fraccaroli, Nicolò & Giovannini, Alessandro & Jamet, Jean-Francois & Persson, Eric, 2022. "Ideology and monetary policy: the role of political parties’ stances in the ECB’s parliamentary hearings," Working Paper Series 2655, European Central Bank.
    18. Jack Sutton & Golnaz Shahtahmassebi & Haroldo V Ribeiro & Quentin S Hanley, 2022. "Population density and spreading of COVID-19 in England and Wales," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 17(3), pages 1-19, March.
    19. Laha, A. K. & Putatunda, Sayan, 2017. "Real Time Location Prediction with Taxi-GPS Data Streams," IIMA Working Papers WP 2017-03-02, Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, Research and Publication Department.
    20. Carrie M. Leslie & Alva I. Strand & Elizabeth A. Ross & Giovanni Tolentino Ramos & Eli S. Bridge & Phillip B. Chilson & Christopher E. Anderson, 2021. "Shifting the Balance among the ‘Three Rs of Sustainability:’ What Motivates Reducing and Reusing?," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 13(18), pages 1-12, September.
    21. Jenni A. Shearston & A. Mychal Johnson & Arce Domingo-Relloso & Marianthi-Anna Kioumourtzoglou & Diana Hernández & James Ross & Steven N. Chillrud & Markus Hilpert, 2020. "Opening a Large Delivery Service Warehouse in the South Bronx: Impacts on Traffic, Air Pollution, and Noise," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 17(9), pages 1-19, May.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:palcom:v:5:y:2019:i:1:d:10.1057_s41599-019-0280-3. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.nature.com/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.