为了在全球范围内标注西班牙方言，语言学研究学者Bruno Gonçalves和David Sánchez分析了超过5000万的具有地理标记的推文，认真观看了一些特定的词，这些词随着方言的不同而有所变化。比如sandwich这个单词，不同的方言写法就有以下许多种，可以是bocadillo,bocadito,bocata,emparedado,sandwich,sangüis,sangüich或者是sanwich。
他们发现“这些轮廓分明的宏观区域的存在都拥有共同的词汇特征。”换句话说，从南美洲来的人一般情况下会和从中美地区或者是西班牙来的人说的西班牙语不一样。这没有什么惊奇的。但是他们也发现了一些让他们感到惊奇的事情：除了一些广为人知的西班牙区域性方言以外，还存在两种全球性超级方言，研究学者这样命名它们。
第一个“超级方言”，即超级方言α，它是指主要的美洲和西班牙城市使用的语言，并且这种语言相当于带有浓重城市化元素的国际变体。而第二个“超级方言”，即超级方言β，它指的是那些在一些乡村地区和小城镇使用的语言。
这意味着什么呢？举个例子，一位从马德里城市地区来的西班牙人说起话来就像是从迈阿密城市地区来的人一样，但是却不像从安达卢西亚乡村地区来的人的口音。研究学者发现，城市很自然的会运用“语言向心力”，这种语言向心力更喜欢将语言统一化。更直白的说，居住在人口稠密的城市环境里的人们口音越来越类似于其他人，并且也越来越类似于分布在全球各个地方的居住在人口稀少的乡村环境中的人们的口音。
供大众交流使用的twitter和其他工具则帮助加速了这一过程的推进。(欲了解更多全球资讯，请关注中国进出口网：www.Chinainout.com)
In an attempt to map Spanish dialects on a global scale, linguistics researchers Bruno Gonçalves and David Sánchez analyzed more than 50 million geotagged tweets, looking at certain words which vary from dialect to dialect. The word for sandwich, for instance, can be bocadillo, bocadito, bocata, emparedado, sandwich, sangüis,sangüich, or sanwich, depending on the dialect.
They found “the existence of well defined macroregions sharing common lexical properties” — in other words, people from South America generally speak a different Spanish than those from Central America or Spain. No surprise there. But they also discovered something that did surprise them: in addition to well-known regional dialects of Spanish, there exist two global “superdialects,” as the researchers dubbed them.
The first superdialect — Superdialect α — “is utilized by speakers in main American and Spanish cities and corresponds to an international variety with a strongly urban component,” while the second superdialect — Superdialect β — is spoken mostly in “rural areas and small towns.”
What does this mean? That a Spanish speaker from urban Madrid, for instance, sounds more like someone from urban Miami than someone from rural Andalucía. Cities, the researchers found, naturally exert a “linguistic centripetal force that favors dialect unification.” In plain English, people living in densely-populated urban environments begin to sound more and more like one another, and more and more like those living in other densely-populated urban environments across the globe. The ubiquity of Twitter and other tools for mass communication have helped the process along.
