  Conversations reflect the existing norms of a language. Previously, we found
that utterance lengths in English fictional conversations in books and movies
have shortened over a period of 200 years. In this work, we show that this
shortening occurs even for a brief period of 3 years (September 2009-December
2012) using 229 million utterances from Twitter. Furthermore, the subset of
geographically-tagged tweets from the United States show an inverse proportion
between utterance lengths and the state-level percentage of the Black
population. We argue that shortening of utterances can be explained by the
increasing usage of jargon including coined words.
