But even if we can’t expect Twitter to be an unerring emotional barometer, it is proving extremely valuable for understanding how language varies among different demographic groups. A team of computational linguists at Carnegie Mellon University led by Jacob Eisenstein and Brendan O’Connor has used geocoded tweets to build maps of regional language use across the United States. The amount of data available for analysis is many orders of magnitude bigger than what could be collected with traditional dialect surveys.

From these mountains of data can be gleaned hidden patterns of informal English, like the profusion of hella as a form of emphasis in Northern California, as in, “It’s hella cold out there.” Slangy phonetic spellings also show distinct patterns of distribution, with New Yorkers preferring suttin to sumthin (for something) and Californians writing koo or coo for cool. Even emoticons differ from region to region.

This study attracted negative attention this year from Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, who listed it as one of the “questionable” projects financed by the National Science Foundation in a report challenging the foundation’s budget for the social sciences. But the research was vigorously defended by Randal E. Bryant, dean of Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science, who pointed to its real-world applications. “The key finding was that seemingly meaningless slang and jargon can reveal important properties of the author’s identity, a point of interest for both corporations and the intelligence community,” Mr. Bryant said.

Still, the Twitterologists will continue to have a tough row to hoe in justifying their research to those who think that Twitter is a trivial form of communication. No less a figure than Noam Chomsky has taken Twitter to task recently for its “superficiality.”

“It is not a medium of a serious interchange,” Mr. Chomsky said, a blanket charge that ignores the diversity of voices to be found on Twitter. Regardless of how unserious Twitter exchanges may appear on the surface, many of Mr. Chomsky’s fellow linguists are discovering that Twitter can help uncover truths about our social interactions that are quite serious indeed.