Twitter reveals geographical dialect

PITTSBURGH (AP) - Just as you can often tell what part of the country a person is from by the way they speak, you can pick up similar clues from the way they tweet.

At least, that's what researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are saying. They've checked out messages from Twitter from a one-week period last year.

They found the social networking site is full of its own kinds of geographical dialects.

For example, people who use "y'all" tend to hail from the South, while terms like "suttin" -- for something -- are used by people from New York. Even a word for "cool" can be a dividing line within states.

Researchers said those from southern California tend to shorten it to "coo," while those in the northern part of Cali use "koo."