Now We Stronger than Ever: African-American English Syntax in Twitter

African American English (AAE) is a well-established dialect that exhibits a distinctive syntax, including constructions like habitual be. Using data mined from the social media service Twitter, the proposed senior thesis project intends to study the demographic distribution of a subset of AAE syntactic constructions. This study expands on previous sociolinguistic Twitter work (Eisenstein et al., 2011) by adding part-of-speech tags to the data, thus enabling detection of short-range syntactic features. Through an analysis of ethnic and gender data associated with AAE tweets, this project will provide a more accurate description of the dialect’s speakers and distribution.