Twitter as a sociolinguistic research tool: pros and cons

Abstract

Due to the recent popularization of social networks, many people across the world are sharing huge amounts of information using the Internet. A large proportion of this information is in textual form and is easily accessible, so sociolinguistic research should be able to use it as means of obtaining information about how people communicate. Even though this is clearly an opportunity, data collected in this manner show some characteristics which may limit or even bias the results, so they need to be considered before starting the research process. On the one hand, this article explores the advantages of using data obtained from one of the most popular social networks, Twitter, and on the other hand it considers the problems and limitations which may be encountered by sociolinguists when using this method. In this way, researchers thinking about using Twitter as a sociolinguistic research tool will have information about the pros and the cons of using this new data gathering methodology.

Keywords: Twitter; social networks; sociolinguistic methodology; Web 2.0.