The biggest flaw is parceling populations by State. US states are great statistical aggregrators, but not good disciminators. You can tell because of the narrow range of numbers. None is beyond one statistical deviation from the norm. All are clustered in the middle.

You need to look at cities. Even there, some have huge "metroplex" suburban satellites; and some of those have been regionalized into county plans. (Los Angeles is the paradigm.)

When we talk about the erroneous learning via public schools, we fail to identify "deep claims" such as the fact that the USA consists of 50 states. Even the Libertarian Party arrays itself alphabetically by state. Rail hubs and airports might tell you more about the lands and the peoples.

To answer that question we'd have to have the tweets or communication excerpts shown to a random sample of native English speakers and see if they get it. The communication not conforming to a standard does not equal loss of intelligibility.

Communication is all about understanding, is it not? So if one person can't understand another because of one's use of non-standard terminology, we have a communications breakdown.

If you only want to be understood by a narrow range of people who talk your same lingo or use your own code, that's your choice. The cost/consequence, however, is loss of intelligibility and understanding from those outside that circle.

It reminds me of that study that said people from Wisconsin are less polite in a survey of call center transcripts. They measured the frequency of the words please, thank you, and you're welcome. Those are commonly expressed as "once", "hey", and "you bet" in Wisconsin, so it was totally unfair.

I suspect what's happening here is that in states with more urban population and more high-tech, people are better at abbreviating on twitter. Less high-tech rural people write things out grammatically correct the old fashioned way.

Actually, sociologists have done numerous studies and conclude that intelligent people consistently use intelligent language and avoid slang, swearing, or regionalisms.

One of the best tips I ever heard about applying for a job is to always speak professionally because people take you as professionally as you act. If you swear or use colloquialisms or slang, you will appear less intelligent to the other person. Think to yourself: when was the last time you considered a person using the word "bling" and thought to yourself "this is a person I want to emulate" ?

Note that I agree that a Twitter feed probably isn't the best place to analyze speech, but it was probably one of the quickest ways to get a massive sample...

And they only checked 500k tweets across the nation. Even if those tweets were from a single person and no one person had multiple tweets counted, that's .1% of the population.