Eur. Phys. J. B (2012) 85: 397
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2012-30711-0

Regular Article

Adaptation of fictional and online conversations to communication media

National Institute of Physics, University of the Philippines Diliman, 1101 Quezon City, Philippines

^a e-mail: may@nip.upd.edu.ph

Received: 1 August 2012
Received in final form: 27 September 2012
Published online: 3 December 2012

Abstract

Conversations allow the quick transfer of short bits of information and it is reasonable to expect that changes in communication medium affect how we converse. Using conversations in works of fiction and in an online social networking platform, we show that the utterance length of conversations is slowly shortening with time but adapts more strongly to the constraints of the communication medium. This indicates that the introduction of any new medium of communication can affect the way natural language evolves.